New game releases of May 20-26
Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
The Last of Us digital download lets you start playing sooner
Weekend PC download deals: Borderlands 2 for $11
Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection coming to PS3 in July for $50
Madden NFL 25's $99 'Anniversary Edition' includes Sunday Ticket
Final Fantasy 8 getting PC re-release (in Japan)
Crysis Developer Moving Away from PC Exclusives; Cites Piracy as 'Core Problem of PC Gaming'
by Chris Faylor, Apr 30, 2008 7:32am PDTCrysis and Far Cry creator Crytek has revealed its intent to focus more on consoles and move away from creating PC-exclusive titles due to the "huge piracy" problems of the platform.
"We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore," Crytek president Cevat Yerli told PC Play. "Similar games [to Crysis] on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future."
The studio had previously revealed it was working on at least one console title and a non-FPS game along with the still-underway efforts to bring its CryENGINE 2 technology to consoles.
The Crytek president noted that piracy had significantly hurt the retail performance of Crysis, the company's CryENGINE 2-powered PC-exclusive sci-fi shooter that arrived last fall and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide.
"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis," he continued. "We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable."
Yerli went on to state his belief that piracy is "the core problem of PC gaming...to the degree that pirate games inherently destroy the platform." His comments are similar in tone to those made by many other PC developers, including id, Epic and Infinity Ward.
Comments
Crytek wanted to make the coolest looking game they could imagine and said screw the requirements they don't matter... but they do!
I loved FarCry, I desperately wanted to play this game, I still do, but I'm not going to go fork out much more money on PC hardware than a console costs just to play 1 game. I have alot of gamer friends, and not 1 of them bought the game because they new their rigs couldn't play it. Of course everybody got CoD4 because they could play and new it would be great.
I was a PC gaming fanatic and generally despised the consoles. Now as much at it pains me to say, I'm a console fan. The fact that I could buy a 360 that will play any game at it's full quality for 5 years was too hard to turn down. No more forking out loads of money on hardware every year or 2 to keep up. No more turning down my settings so my graphics look a generation behind what they could. On a console you get the best that you possibly can with that hardware, period.
Piracy does hurt PC games, but I think it's a stretch to put the blame on that for Crysis sales.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 5 replies.
Crytek painted themselves into a corner with their game -- no one wants to buy a game for their computer if they are really unsure as to whether it will play or not.
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