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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
No, seriously, this is stupid. Yes, piracy is a problem, but not THIS big of a problem, at least, not for most. There will always be a constant base number of pirates, people who do not buy these games with cash, and never will. You shouldn't even think of these people as lost customers, because you are never going to get their money. Then, there is the variable number, the people who MIGHT buy your game, but also might pirate it. Those people are what we are talking about. True, Crysis got record high numbers of these types of pirates, but the question is why? The answer is the high system requirements. People aren't going to shell out $50 for a game that MIGHT work on their system, or will work like crap. The "variable" group who pirate games generally have budget-to-midrange systems, and so they are often on the edge of this gap. So, they pirate Crysis. While Crysis did work on lower end systems, it did so just barely, and often with very low performance relative to how good it looked (on low settings, not that good). If Crysis were to scale a lot better, you would have far less of this type of piracy. Its that simple. Then, as far as copy protection, the answer is NOT to adopt technologies which annoy the crap out of many legit users (like Mass Effect's CP did to me), but instead to use more traveled routes. I am talking STEAM. Steam is a great distribution system, it is VERY effective at fighting piracy (although not fool-proof, like any system), and it has stood the test of time. If you are going to adopt CP, adopt Steam.
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