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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
These guys don't realize that the PC market is different from the console market. Sure there's a big chunk that intersects (and that chunk is getting bigger all the time) but a big part of the reason games like this aren't selling is that PC Gamers have seen it all before. At what point does having the same gameplay with prettier graphics no longer become a selling point?
People are tired of the same games they played 5 years ago, except now they run worse with minor graphical improvements. Consoles have a whole different demographic to appeal to, people who haven't been playing shooters for 15 years, people who have played shooters for 15 years but maybe didn't play them so much that their burnt out. Some people just prefer shooters on consoles at this point. The PC is capable of so many interesting things that no one is taking advantage of.
I mean look at WoW vs every other MMO there is. WoW is a fantastic game, and it shows in their sales. There's a ton of other MMOs out there, TONS of them. Most of them fail. The MAJORITY of them fail. Piracy is not an issue for any one of them. What is an issue for them is that their knock offs. They don't innovate. If you don't innovate then you have to at least have character and polish, and these games don't have that either.
Neither did Crysis. It's got no character, it didn't innovate, and it asked a demographic that's been playing these games for 15 years to spend $3000 on hardware to play a game they've already played. It's not going to work. Was it pirated? Hells yes it was. Would it have sold well if it was a well done, well marketed, innovative title? Yes it would've, and I wish developers would at least acknowledge that before they start pointing at pirates.
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