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)
More Game Gear titles headed to 3DS eShop
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
- Good games sell, bad games dont
- Low demanding games sell, high demanding games dont
- First person shooters are not as popular anymore on PC
- High retail prices are stupid
- Pirates are not your customers and never were, do not equate them as part of the user base.
Ok, so crytek. Next time before you blame pirates, lets try to make a game that you KNOW people want to play and there is a market for. You made a game based around the premise of showing off your engine and the only people who could run it were people with 8xxxx cards. Thats like maybe 10% of the pc audience. Then you decided to make a first person shooter, again maybe 1/2 of that 10% want to play shooters. These stats are flakey, but you can see my point.
Guess what, more people are going to pirate your game on console (go look at a torrent site if you want hard numbers) than on PC but because consoles have like a 10/1 ratio over PC users you'll make up for the difference. Dont spread this bullshit about the PC platform just because you cant do any market research like many other devs can.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 4 replies.
Good games sell, bad games dont
- I hope you don't believe this. Bioshock sold half as many copies as Transformers: The Game and Carnival Games. If you multiplied the sales of Psychonauts by ten you would match the sales of 50 Cent: Bulletproof
First person shooters are not as popular anymore on PC
- FPS titles are as popular as ever on the PC, it's just that people are pirating them, not buying them.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1263
http://kotaku.com/344848/piracy-makes-call-of-duty-4-devs-sad
High retail prices are stupid
- PC games are already $ 20 cheaper than their console counterparts and sell much less. What do you expect them to do?
Pirates are not your customers and never were, do not equate them as part of the user base
- I don't know how you can claim that with a straight face. I'm sure you believe all the people pirating MP3's off Limewire never bought a CD before it came around, and would stop listening to music altogether if they couldn't pirate anymore. The vast majority of pirates are casual pirates, and the fact that PC games that don't have their DRM cracked before the day of the release sell much better is proof that people will stop pirating if it's not worth the hassle.
Guess what, more people are going to pirate your game on console (go look at a torrent site if you want hard numbers)
- Maybe you should follow your own advice. Piracy on the PC is much, much larger than with consoles, it's nowhere close. For one thing, all you have to do is install a free version of MagicISO, not solder a chip onto a 360, voiding the warranty. That's why developers are complaining: games like Crysis, Assassin's Creed and COD4 had their PC game sales eclipsed by completed torrent seeds before they were even released. Relic has said that when they release a new patch for Company of Heroes, the amount of downloads it gets beats actual copies that have been sold by almost a 4:1 margin.
There's a reason why PC games are heading towards microtransaction games like Battlefield Heroes or Maple Story or completely online and subscription based. It's because of piracy making that the only option.
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