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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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http://www.neowin.net/news/gamers/04/02/04/far-cry-dev-studio-raided
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The Hotter the game the more it sells but the more it is downloaded as well.
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Please, please, PLEASE stop saying this garbage. That's like saying someone who steals a Ferrari doesn't cost Ferrari anything because "He wasn't going to buy one anyway."
Shut up with this stupid argument already. It's a bunch of crap.
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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.
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There was a fucking demo. The demo was enough of an indication that the game would or would not run on your PC. Pirating the game to see how it ran on your system is stealing. Pirating the game because you never intended to pay for it in the first place is stealing. You are using something that you have no right to use, just like pirating music, movies, whatever. You can claim that you never would have paid to see a movie so you downloaded it, but that point is completely VALUELESS. If you think that makes sense, you are a moron.
If you never would have paid in the first place, you never should have downloaded it. Because you did, you had a desire to check it out and I am sorry, but that costs money. If there is no free demo, you don't get to play it for free. Seeing people make these stupid arguments here and then complain about GTA being a console-exclusive for now is pathetic and sad and more than a little dumb.
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1) The game had some form of enjoyable re-playability
2) Optional online content distribution
3) Created enjoyable, refined multiplayer
Instead, they released a benchmark with a linear storyline.
Consoles aren't really the answer anyway. Look at the rampant Wii game piracy for example.
What has worked well? Things like Blizzard's Battle.net and Valve's Steam solutions. Not every easy to pirate your way onto battle.net at all and it offers something that millions of people enjoy daily for a multitude of games that sold incredibly well. The same is true for Valve's games.
I own a copy of Crysis and I wish I didn't. Does a console fix that? Definitely not.
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People are not going to take a chance on a PC game running on their machine for $50 (they buy it on console). People are not going to put down $50 for a crappy game not worth finishing.
People are going to put down $50 for a game that interests them greatly due to the developer or franchise (HL2) or has integrated multiplayer and re-playability (Starcraft 2). The rest of the games can just sit on the shelf for all I care. But that's just the problem. No one will play your crappy game.
Shitty games are killing PC gaming, not piracy. Piracy is the symptom of games not having enough value for the cost. Thus, you plunk down your $200 for 4 quality games a year and forget the rest. Piracy allows those games to reach new markets (future buyers/someone who could not afford your game or didn't care enough). If you are worried about losing sales, you need to add more value to your product.
The problem is that Pirating is Easy and Cheap, which is the definition of good Distribution, thus it is rampant. Torrent sites are the easiest and cheapest way to get your product to the consumer. We don't need to pay someone to copy the disc and put it in a box on a shelf. Embrace online distribution. Embrace Indie development and torrents as distribution. Stop trying to make $50 off of a disc in a box.
The torrent websites are spreading information (copyrighted or not). They are not really REMOVING dollars from the PC Game industry. The alternative to piracy is not more sales, it's a dead game that no one plays and no one cares about...like Crysis. Like that $70 mil game for Dreamcast that I'd never heard of before today.
Cunts.
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Some devs need to look at Blizzard and realize high poly count doesn't necessarily mean better.
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- 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.
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Crytek - Piracy doesn't ruin sales of your game...this is what does:
1. Your audience...especially those that are into FPS's tend to pirate more. If you make a game for them, expect this problem. Why don't they pirate the same type of games for the consoles? Because they take the path of least resistance. It's easier to pirate for PC...for now...soon enough it's going to be the same problem for consoles as they become more like PC's.
2. PC has never sold numbers like consoles. Stop benchmarking your sales against Halo 3.
3. Your games runs smoothly at high detail on like 2% of people's machines. I'm betting 80% of your pirates can't be considered a lost sale, because these are people who would never have purchased the game to begin with. Who wants to spend $50 bucks to "hope" it works on their machine? I'm sorry - the early buzz on Crysis was that it won't run on most hardware...later that was proven when it came out. Don't blame PC piracy on your inability to build a game for current and next gen hardware.
4. Look at WoW, the Sims, Sins of a Solar Empire, anything from ID, etc. These games sold a shit load and I'm sure they were pirated a shit load. Bottom line...make a great game that runs on people's machines and you won't have an issue.
So lets see...you built a game that:
Requires a ridiculous machine to run
Launched a week after COD 4 - WTF were you thinking?
Caters to the hardcore FPS fan base
Wasn't marketed worth shit
Still has bugs and runs like shit nearly 6 months after release
Lets blame the pirates...
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I think Crysis has multiplayer, but no one ever talks about it.
don't say it, just fing leave. as the governator would say, "get out!"
nobody is going to miss you. there are a thousand guys right behind you trying to get in. guys who will find a way to make money where you couldn't.
good fing riddance.
jin
Seems like Valve is about the only company left supporting PC gaming as a primary and consoles sec. Why? They have a much better way to fight piracy using Steam. On that subject, why did EA and Crytek make it so easy to pirate the game? COD4, same thing, hell Assassins Creed was out and pirated before the game was even released, lol. Is it that these companys are stupid or don't care since they already made the money from kickbacks from Nvidia and other hardware companys. Had they all used Steam, piracy probably would have been cut right in half.
I think PC gaming is going to go all mainstream for gaming and the real good hardcore stuff that we PC gamers have enjoyed in the past will go to the next gen X-Box (720 or what ever). I really don't see my self upgrading my PC again for gaming as the future game releases look no better than the 360s, nor do any of them need more than a 8800GTX and Intel Core2@3.5ghz to run. If things do not change myself and many others will get the next microsoft console over upgrading the PC. Why? Cuz thats what we will need to enjoy all the great games.
Why don't hardware companys (Microsoft included) pay software companys to make great games exclusive to the PC with cutting edge software to run on THEIR cutting edge hardware? Then charge nothing for the game as it will also include some ads wile loading stages and maps ect... Now it would be ALOT harder to pirate hardware than it is to pirate software. Agreed?
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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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marketing, marketing, marketing!!!!!
They think they are wasting there money on marketing their games in non-traditional places.
COD4 and WOW and all the popular ones have great and many commercials in numerous venues.
and they sell millions.
I know for a fast that when i could grab even a "decent" title for $20-$30 i bought more games,now I'm not willing to fork out $50-$60 for something that MAY be worth my time. though i have given up piracy and just lowered my purchases over all.
Also are there any numbers on how many of the pirates are from areas where a game may not be available, either due to legal issues (anti -hate laws in germany) or import problems such as excessive tariffs or political import bans?
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1. Produce something NEW. Not a rehash of a previous release. Break out of the genre's mold. One or two gimmick features aren't enough to be considered "innovation".
2. Focus on the GAMEPLAY. If it can be done while being able to run on over 50% of the current average PC userbase, your target market is that much larger.
Crysis was FarCry with DX10, and was able to run nicely on less than 1% of the average PC userbase on release. PC gamers don't like slow games, and they don't like having to wait two hardware generations for a game to be able to consistently run at 60 FPS in 1280 x 960.
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Uncomplicate it and make pc gaming affordable again
Maybe $100 graphics cards again both AGP and PCI-E that are affordable....AGP just because i know theres people out there with that old stuff still and i read the jump to PCI-e wasn't that huge anyway
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My 2 cents
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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there is nothing to get hysterical about.
more focus on gameplay and story and less on graphics i think should be the new trend for PC gaming, we aint going to beat consoles in graphics without spending quite a bit and there's still a large amount of people with old hardware so why not just make a great game about Morrowind graphics but amazing story and gameplay
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It could have failed because the game itself was below average, the visuals were purposely restricted on Windows XP to boost Vista sales and the whole thing was hyped more than the next coming of Jeebus but delivered less than Halo 1 (which is saying a whole lot).
Meanwhile truly fun and well made games such as Team Fortress 2 and Call Of Duty 4 are thriving on the PC platform.
Piracy seems to the be the new favourite excuse for companies that produce crap games. Then by saying they're moving to consoles they are basically insulting console users everywhere.
So console players are that gullible huh?
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