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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
PC Gamer US: Recently, you’ve said that Crysis was [among] the most pirated games. How do you know that?
Cevat Yerli: Well, we went into the Torrent statistics and there were charts for this. We learned that [piracy] harmed Call of Duty 4 quite a bit, too. We were hit even stronger because our spec requirements were, when we released, pretty high. There was a statistic that there were around 15–20 [pirated copies] per one copy sold; it doesn’t mean we would sell 15–20 times more, of course, but at least if piracy was lower, we would double our sales. For the PC this is a big issue, because if [piracy] continues like this, you will not see PC exclusives happening, because it’s prohibitively expensive.
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