Crytek: Crysis Patches Prove Abundant Piracy, Consoles Are 'Very Good DRM Technologies'

What a bunch of Whiners. I remember this too. Ran into it when i was looking for Crysis Warhead's sales.

Sad part is that Crysis 1 was a PC exclusive and sold around 2 million copies. Yet they're still complaining? Honestly, what kind of sales were they expecting? Not only does the game have steep requirements but they truly did jack shit to optimize the original Crysis. It was purely unoptimized in every way. Literally the only engine in the history of PC games to be unoptimized as much as Cry Engine 2 was for Crysis. I'm sorry but they have no base. They're looking for a scapegoat to justify only 2 million copies in sales?

I'd like to see them go console exclusive now and and sell even less like what happened with Battlefield bad Company (which sold less than 1.5 million on 2 platforms 360 and PS3). Yet, the PC exclusive Battlefield 2 (not including expansions) has sold over 2 million copies. What would Crytek's excuse be then? Fact of the matter is that, despite piracy being on PC, many upon many PC games still sell millions. Go on Wikipedia there is a huge list there of all of them. And it's not "20 pirates per 1 buying PC gamer" as these jackasses would like you to believe. I'm sorry, what a joke. If that were true the majority of PC games would not sell as well as they do. Piracy is definitely in the minority. It's a problem regardless because it's stealing but it's a problem on all platforms, not just PC.

I just saw Cry Engine 3 as well. Looks like Cry Engine 2 on low - medium settings. Good job Crytek, you fail. Never buying another Crytek game again. I bought Crysis and Crysis Warhead (as well as FarCry 1) on PC and enjoyed them all. But, sorry for you, you just lost a paying customer. Crytek, you fail. Go whine to your mothers about your "terrible" 2 million copies in sales. Cry more babies.

HOLY FARKING DOODOO!

The game sold like, 2.5 million, and THERE WERE MORE PEOPLE ONLINE THAN RETAIL/REGISTERED SALES?!

Why the hell wasn't crysis this popular when I started playing the game in the first week? Then all of a sudden there's this 2.5million user spike?

I didn't pirate Crysis...

But I could see why people did...
"Will this even run on my machine? I'm not dishing out $60 if it won't even run..."

Download....
whether it ran well or not, they now have it, they played it... no motivation to buy it afterwards..

Was there even a demo-test for this game prior to it launching??


I'm willing to bet Crysis 2 will sell more units than 1...

Fine, make a game for the consoles. I'd rather be playing a Crytek console game than hearing them go on and on about piracy.

"consoles themselves are, in one sense, simply very good DRM technologies."

Yup, keep telling yourself that if it makes you sleep better at night. Nevermind the "loaning" of games to friends. Or how about the used game market? How are those sales working out for you? Then you've got the people who have a couple 360's, one modded and one not modded for use on live. That's still cheaper than a decent gaming rig built from the ground up.

I'm not arguing in favor of piracy, nor against the fact that PC games are often obtained without purchase. Seriously though, if these devs think console DRM is "very good" then I'll have some of what they're smoking please.

I honestly don't know why the piracy and DRM card needs to be played to justify expanding your market to the consoles. As a company wanting to get as much return on its investment as possible, Crytek would be silly not to.

Piracy is NOT an issue, bad games ,tech demos and lack of innovation equals bad sales.

Crytek, please just stop talking. We get that Crysis didn't sell as well as you had hoped or planned. We get that you think piracy took a lot of sales from you. We get that you're moving on to console development. There's no need to keep belaboring the point. We get it.

What you don't seem to get is that you're not going to win anyone over this way. Most of us are not in the industry so we're just not going to sympathize with you on the piracy thing as much as you would like. And even if we do, for the gamers who actually bought your game there's nothing we can do about it. I bought Crysis, I did my part, but I can't force others to buy it nor can I make all the pirates get legit and buy a copy. At best you come across as chastising the people who are not in the room, at worst you're preaching to the choir.

Go ahead, do console games. Make cross-platform games. Make a version of the Crytek engine which will run on consoles and max out PC's. Do it because of the piracy concerns. Hell, go ahead and do this even if your games sold on the PC just fine. Just stop telling the PC user community that they're full of pirates. That goes over about as well as telling an ethnic group that their ranks are full of criminals.

I can't help but notice the only ones complaining about piracy are the ones that are failing. The record labels couldn't keep up with the changes the digital world brought and they all blamed piracy. Just think if they were on top of selling DRM free MP3's back in late 90's before Napster came out, what a difference it would have made. But no they were making so much money selling CD's to everyone replacing their old tapes and vinyl as well as buying all the new crap that they didn't want to innovate. So their dying out, good riddance and long live Indie music.

Who are you people anyways, I have never meet anyone like you. I don`t know a single person who hasn`t pirated something and I`ve never meet anyone who was vocal against it. If you do exist and aren`t the hypocrite I think you are you should speak up in real life.

PC Gaming is going to change but it won't go away, just the shitty publishers who don't know how to innovate and just want to imitate and cash in. They can leave for the console, were seriously better off. The few publishers who get it will prosper. But the real future of gaming on the PC will be with indie developers. You don't have to spend millions to make a good game.

Piracy will always exist. Crying about it and pushing stronger DRM will do nothing. Make a better game, release more content for free, support it and build a community, make it less expensive and explore new business models and you will succeed. Continue to spend millions and do nothing innovative except for better graphics and you will fail, and you deserve to die off.

Now enough arguing about this I'm going to play TF2, love that free Heavy update. Gabe has said that keeping their customers happy has been the best way to advertise the game. Every time they release a new update their sales jump higher. Who would have thought that releasing a fantastic game, that scales well on all hardware, sold for a great price, while consistently releasing free content would actually increase sales. What a crazy world we live in.

There are effective solutions to the PC piracy issue. Why don't more PC games simply require online authentication, even for single player?

"consoles themselves are, in one sense, simply very good DRM technologies."

So is Steam you idiot.

Fire business manager now.

I bought the game... and i've tried installing the 2.0 patch several times always fucks up... so i can account for atleast 3 or 4 of their downloads.....


LOL

Lots of fucking idiotic post every time PC piracy is mentionned. People think the know it all.

Lots of PC devs are spending lots of money doing studies around piracy but some random Joe on a public forum or chatty thinks he knows better....

Every game gets pirated, be it on the 360, Wii or PC. Only the PS3 at the moment doesn't have pirated games.

So the real question is, why are other games selling like crazy despite them being pirated?

I am deeply saddened by this because I damn sure don't intend to play the next FarCry games on a console.

I don't care about exclusives both PC and Consoles should get the same games.

The direction of things on the PC lately has me seriously questioning how much money it is worth spending when I build my next PC. I can't see spending the money to buy a 4870 X2 or a GeForce 280 with more and more developers targeting consoles as the main audience for their hardcore games first, and then only porting to the PC after a year or so to avoid losing sales to piracy.

I may just stick with a basic system with a cheap motherboard and a 4850 for a video card when I build/buy the new system.

"We want to continue to provide our fans in the PC world a rich and engaging experience,"... right up until the point when we terminate all patch support for that experience... while trying to sell you the rehash experience you accused us of stealing last time...

His quote does not imply the headline:

"a lot more active [Crysis] players than there were unit sales."

does not imply

"More Crysis Pirates Than Units Sold"

because "active Crysis players" includes both pirates and legitimate purchases. It implies there are a lot of pirates but not that there are more of them than legitimate purchases. (Assuming that the "extra patch downloads" are mainly pirates.)

(I'm not saying piracy is a non-issue. I don't think that at all.)

I didnt ever download the patch because i dont play it online and it never gave me any problems, but i bought the game. I imagine alot of people are in the same boat as me, but we dont count because that would put a damper on this piracy bitching stunt they have been trying to play.

I really don't care if this gets me banned. Most of you posting here are fucking idiots.

This guy is saying that there were more people downloading the patch than units sold.
It's a major issue. So even if you think the game sucked or the requirement were too high, more people were downloading the patch than legit sales. Obviously some people like the game or can run it.

WoW can get away with good sales because it's difficult to pirate (impossible?). XBOX gets good sales because if you mod it, you get banned from LIVE.

What are the consequences to pirating a single player PC game? ZERO. HEEEEELLLLLOOO!!!!!!!!!

I'm the anti-statistic: I bought the game and I don't think enough of it to DL the patch. It's collecting dust.

crytek ..pls stop crying...i dont understand devs ..if they think consoles are inherently good at drm , why dont they are work with the gaming hardware manufactures like nvidia and amd to get specialized hardware on there chips to authenticate original games...btw the point i am trying to make is that every one wants to cry about piracy instead of working towards a viable solution to reduce it.
i jus cant imagine playing crysis on those shitty consoles at less than 720p with those shitty graphics ,jaggies and those auto aim features,pausing in between the game to recycle through weapons and shitty shitty AI.. ..which will do every thing but shoot u...Plus limited online play.

Consoles are all about hype...and about consoles been cheaper than PC gaming...any one wid decent hardware knowledge can make a $300 pc today which will runs all those console ports that PC is getting right now at better res , image quality and higher FPS that those consoles can.


Btw ..this is for crytek.

THE DAY U MAKE GAME's FOR CONSOLES+PC I WILL NEITHER BUY THEM NOR PLAY THEM ANY MORE.

It takes nothing away from the PC gamer if the game is also available on another platform.

Didn't Harvey Smith say something like this about Deus Ex: Invisible War during its development?

Crytek has pretty thoroughly ruined their reputation with me with all this bitching and moaning. What do they expect to get from all this? I honestly don't know, because I already shelled out my $50, and I won't do it again.

I don't know where I stand on the whole piracy thing, but I do know that every time the PC loses a developer, somewhere someone thinks it will be a good idea to make another Wii waggle mini game. And you know what that means right? We all lose.

Piracy always was, is and be an even greater issue in the future. These texts just remind me so much of the movie / music industry / Lars Ulrich whining about Napster, it just will get worse.

There will always be cheapskates that either do not have the money or understand that for a good game you have to pay up. If you like a developer/publisher and like the games buy them, if not play the demo and go whine, fanboi or flame on the forums. If there is no demo either wait 15'000 years until it comes out on a shitty magazine DVD or lend it from a buddy.

Why not just make a WGA approach for games? Licensed - yes you can install updates/mods/whatever, no valid license, you can play but will have 0 support and can't enjoy the game, maybe even with a time limit of 1 week. Like this no additional cost of supporting an unlicensed product exists and you can focus on your real customers. Most companies make 80% of their turnover with 20% of their customers anyway.

People still care about crysis? Why is this even being posted?
Wasted space on the front page, I'll take one replay couch over the 20 posts of crysis/crytek whining.

Of COURSE we lose something when a game like Crysis comes out on consoles. We lose our sanity from having to tell people "Look, no, it does not look as good on your console as it does on the PC. Stop saying that."

I think this is a poor job of article posting. The original article is not about Crytek complaining about Piracy, it is about transitioning to develop on console and the challenges / motivations. The bits pulled out and the title make it seem like Crytek is complaining about piracy randomly, and that is only going to incite the awkward, community-harming "piracy doesn't hurt anyone" crowd.

Well not everyone has a killer PC that can play Crysis on all high settings, duh!! so of course your not gonna be selling that many units.

This stat is kind of broken...Most people that buy games get the patches for them, in that rare case we assume everyone who bought it got the patch, then if anyone formatted and had to redownload the patch again, you are already above the "number of patches downloaded>number of bought games" number.

Also if that is the case if a single person pirated the game, then there would be more downloaded patches then sales. Doesn't make sense, because in that aspect. So unless less than half of the people who bought the game didn't download the patch, that doesn't show anything about how more people pirated the game then people who bought it. (saying not even half of buying people downloading the patch seems like abit much.)

again !!! crytek guys have to stop whining, we get it, pc gamers are real baaad thieves ...for your own information crytek-ers, console games get pirated as well, come to my place and you can find a 360 game for 5 dollars, a ps2 game for 1.5 dollars, a wii game for 5 dollars as well and they're all selling like hot cakes

I didn't even download the game, it looks that bad.

oh wow only the 70th time the shack has posted this. I think the new way to get hits is becoming a bit transparent. :/

Crysis is spec'd well beyond the systems of a vast majority of the PC gaming user base. The most recent Top 10 Selling PC games available on Shacknews shows that ALL of them have low system requirements. The most taxing game on the list is the WoW series.

While I'm not saying that Crytek should have made the game playable on a Pentium 2, there's something to be said for keeping the technology ceiling within reach for your potential customers.

Long and short of it is, I think Crytek is kinda dumb.

did they ever think about people redownloading the patch because of it breaking or whatever? i know i personally did a few times because i reinstalled windows twice since i bought crysis and then had to install the patches twice on one install because it was just buggy as hell, and didnt think to keep them downloaded. i know this probably wont make a big percentage but i just dont think you can go by patch downloads alone

So you build a game for 5-10% of the hardware out there and then cry when it doesn't sell.

I hate piracy too, but look at whole picture.

Piracy has to stop, but Crysis did not suceed because of picracy alone.

Oh yea Crytech. Your staff tell people looking for game support that they should quit slagging when all they ask is why they can't get past a certain part of the game because the AI did not kick in, doesn't help either...

Just waiting for all of the cocks to complain about how piracy isn't an issue, never was, and never will be.