Well, my PC gaming brothers and sisters, we're in more trouble. Crysis CEO Cevat Yerli has come out with a statement that, coming from him, nearly rivals the stupidity of the anti-video game media morons.

He basically has said, Crytek will no longer be PC exclusive. His reasons are that piracy is totally destroying the platform, and that similar games on consoles sell 4 to 5 times as many. Luckily, they will still support the PC platform.

(Source - http://megagames.com/, although it is elsewhere)

Why do i think this is so stupid? Crysis is, as we all know, the big bad beast of pc gaming glory. Its the benchmark for graphics and physics, the true test of your machine. The problem is that very very few rigs can pass that test.
Fact is, not many people can play Crysis at a level that i consider playable (high settings at at least 20 fps in normal combat). According the latest Steam survey's, just under 10% of users have a 8800 level graphics card. Thats around 150000 people who can play Crysis well enough (and i bet a fuck-ton less can actually get a good framerate (30+) at high settings or above).

Or rather, thats just under 1.5 million gamers who cant play it well enough to justify a purchase.

Crysis is a pretty good shooter, in a world of lots of pretty good, and more than a few excellent shooters. If you make one that can only stand out by running it at high settings, and in fact hype up how amazing the high settings are, then you goddamn better make sure a lot of people can run it at high settings! This should have been obvious, and at the very least, they should have learnt their lesson afterwards.

Perhaps less importantly, they really picked a bad time to release the game. If theyd waited, say, 3 or 4 months, they'd have had many more customers, since the 8800gt and i believe the 9600gt would have been out, both of them cards that can run crysis well enough, and there would have been more than a few gamers chafing to put their shiny new cards through their paces. Not to mention, they competed with Call of Duty 4 and Unreal 3.

Also, the consoles are really coming into their own at the moment. In a couple of years, after pc hardware has continued to increase while the consoles stay the same, pc gamers would have lapped up a game that could show those console noobs what for :P. I actually think that this is nearly as big a reason as piracy as to why pc gaming is having tough times at the moment.

Thats why its such a stupid statement to make. Crysis was never going to sell well. If piracy wasnt possible, people still wouldnt buy it. Id actually be willing to bet the demo hurt them more than it helped.


So what does it mean? Well, its just another nail in the coffin, as they say. Crytek were one of the big developers who set pc gaming apart from the consoles. They made games that could really push hardware (if only they could scale well). Perhaps more importantly, they made game engines, which other devs could buy. If they will no longer support PC exclusively, it could be a long time before someone else makes an engine as groundbreaking and potentially incredible as the cryengine 2.

I still respect Cevat, he and his team did some amazing things with Crysis, but im sad that this is how he thinks now. There are other ways to combat piracy, Steam is the obvious example. Hell, just providing a great multiplayer experience is enough! Or rather, one that enough people can play...