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Crytek CEO Estimates 20 PC Game Pirates for Every One Legitimate Buyer
by Aaron Linde, Jun 27, 2008 1:31pm PDTCrytek chief executive Cevat Yerli offered an assessment of piracy within the PC gaming industry, describing the market as "the most intensely pirated market ever."
"It's crazy how the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now," Yerli told IGN. "For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry."
Yerli added that he hoped to see some change with the release of Crytek's upcoming shooter follow-up Crysis Warhead. When asked if the game would include anti-piracy measures similar to Electronic Arts' activation protocols in the PC edition of BioWare's Mass Effect, the CEO didn't directly specify but hinted at some new ideas.
"Effectively, if the game isn't an online game or multiplayer game—there are challenges regardless of what you do—the game can be cracked. The effort is to make it more difficult to crack, and certainly we're going to make it more difficult this time with Warhead."
Echoing previous reports that Crysis Warhead would be Crytek's last PC-exclusive title, Yerli added that rampant piracy may lead to "less and less games appearing on the PC, or less and less games pushing the boundaries of PC gaming."
"I think our message is if you're a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating... We would only consider full PC exclusives—if the situation continues like this or gets worse—I think we would only consider PC exclusive titles that are either online or multiplayer and no more single-player."
Comments
-you know how many copies you sold (decently well for a PC game btw, especially notable for it's market fracturing hardware requirements)
-you can assess some torrent sites. But you can't assess casual sharing, irc, ftp, web, etc.
-you have zero data on what people did when they torrented. Did they even play it? You talk warez, I think some 17 year old kid in a basement with barely the disposable income to order pizza, a cd-r stack of games most of which he's never played, or if they did it was 5 minutes to call it crap because they're burnt out from their cavalcade of sampling every fucking thing that comes out. Never mind the fact that some people will warez, then buy. Or warez and have a copy that isn't security locked all to hell.
-you have zero data on what people would have done if they didn't torrent. Would they have bought it? Would they just have ignored the game? I played the demo, saw that I was Playing A Solider, Shooting Some Foreign Dudes, and got pretty bored. I guess I could have warezed to try more but why waste my time?
-warezing is hard work. Or at least it takes some modicum of skill and time. You know who doesn't have time? People with jobs. What do people with jobs have? Money. This isn't universal, sure, but most people do not want to fuck with the bass ackwards hoops one must do to play a warezed game. Never mind that they are often inferior. It's moneyless kids who warez.
tl;dr There's no hard statistics to draw any sort of conclusion from, and research into behavior is sketchy if it at all exists. I'm not even saying warez isn't an issue, but this is sensationalism that does no service to the discussion.
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