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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
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In the old and tired line of reasoning that you are expounding on ignores the numerous and obvious benefit to society that duplication brings. If I went to the park and duplicated ice cream cones out of thin air and gave them to everyone in the park, should I be fined for the *potential* sales of the ice cream truck down the block? Of course not, most of the people in the park wouldn't have taken the ice cream if it weren't free.
The fact of the matter is that duplication of data is a fact of life in our modern society. This is the important part: You cannot base a business model on the scarcity of data! If the only way that the makers of Crysis can remain profitable is to only allow the data they created to exist in the hands of paying customers, then they have a flawed and failing business model.
For successful business models that do not rely on the scarcity of data, please see WoW, Eve online, and the myraid of other MMOs. Please examine Quake Live, Kongregate, and other advertising based revenue generators. Please observe Sins of a Solar Empire and other games that do not use copyright protection. As a game developer, your business model may no longer rely on the scarcity of data!
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