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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
Console gamers on the other hand are new to the genre and are completely amazed by the magic of things moving over the internets. So don't waste your time coming up with new ideas, just milk this new demographic and sell them the same old crap. Leave all the heavy-lifting to a few innovative PC developers and then when they come up with something good, you can just copy it a few years later.
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For me, Halo 3 was a depiction of how overbalancing a game could ruin it and how certain mechanics relating to rewarding accuracy to the player were skewed too heavily toward making the game more accessible.
Only certain weapons were subject to bonus damage for hitting the vital HEADSHOT!!! and the weapon you started out with during multiplayer, the Assault rifle, was best used when spraying (in general). You would only need to really burst-fire if you were going to attack someone at Battle Rifle distances and at that point, you'd may as well never fire unless the person were about to die anyway.
My point is, the game became less and less rewarding to people who could aim and tap their fire-button rhythmically to produce controlled bursts of aggression and more about 'who shot who first'..
Even though it opens up a wide array of balance issues, I think the best thing to do for a game is to throw in a number of creatively-designed weapons. I think Duke Nukem 64 had one of the best multiplayer experiences aside from Goldeneye. The incredible variety in weapons and levels made for very fun gameplay. And while many of the weapons from say Goldeneye, and later Perfect Dark which built on that, may have felt samey, it did feel, at least, like something relatively new. You got to pick up new-looking weapons every time and you could even exercise control over some of the games by deciding on the theme of weaponry you killed eachother with.
So Crysis.
Crysis DOES do a few great things and they are all related to the power suit you wore. Being able to physically interact with (grabbing onto and then THROWING) enemy soldiers and other grabbo-objects in the level. That is incredibly fun to do. That is the right step to take. MORE LEVEL INTERACTION. Red Faction did something similar by allowing the player to bore tunnels through parts of the level. The best part about it is that it allows the player to be more creative by putting less emphasis on the 'mass appeal' and more on allowing you to express yourself creatively and employ new tactics or merely copy the ones that other people had stumbled upon.
Katamari Damacy was all about interacting with the level. Each level was essentially the same, but it was different in a Goldeneye to Perfect Dark sort of way. You played the game with a theme and you gradually built up by getting access to newer themes..
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