In a recent interview with IGN, Crytek CEO Cevat Yurli railed on PC piracy yet again. Unlike the last time when the Crysis developer Yurli promised no more PC exclusives because of theft issues, he tosses out some numbers to corroborate his company’s developing dilemma.
The other critique outside Crytek was the fact that the PC industry is really, at the moment, I would say 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. For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry.
When prompted to reveal what new measures would be introduced with Crysis Warhead to curb that magical ratio, Yurli was a bit mum.
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.
I miss the days when a person had to have the game manual to be able to boot up the full version of a game. Piracy was so much more of a personal endeavor back then. The potential thief would have to first dump all eight of the floppy disks onto blank disks, then run to a copy machine to get all the random answers to the questions asked on title screens. Instead of all these differing copy protections, developers should rekindle the archaic method of prevention. Except this time have some sweet Mission Impossible melting manuals or something to avoid scanning.
[Via Shacknews -- Thanks, Brian!]
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Contest:
1:18 PM on 06.29.2008
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Besides, Photoshop has like a 1:1 ratio for Pirated versus Bought.
Its just easier to cry foul to pirates when it comes to investor meetings and the like.
Movies blame games for poor sales, PC games blame pirates, its just a blame game for the excuse of continued funds.
Its just a load of BS. How about the Music industry do they suffer, no. How about the Movie industry where you can catch a movie sometimes before it even hits the screen. No...
Are you attending, or have you been to college recently? The only game Ive heard of anybody actually buying for pc was TF2. Everybody has crisis but I dont even know what the case looks like. And it not digital distribution. The other day there was some one walking down the hallway telling every one they were getting a CoD4 tourney up. I said I didnt have it for pc and withing 5 minutes 4 or 5 people had brought me burned dvds and activation codes.
Pirates mau not be quite the down fall that the companies make it but the 1:15 ratio is totally beleivable
How about Sacred it was a game that did so well they are doing a Sequel. How about Sin of a Solar Empire? How about Spore its not even out yet and the 9.99 CREATURE CREATOR is selling well.
Have you ever heard of Bioshock? The PC version did so WELL, that they made console versions of it.
Might of heard of that one in college cause apparently they teach gaming economics there.
Piracy imo is still a weak excuse. Yes it's there and the ratio maybe true but blaming it screams scapegoat for poor sales to me.
They can try to make Crysis:Warhead harder to crack but when there's a will there's always a way
Go steam.
You know what effects PC games 10x more than pirating? Consoles. We have entered an age in gaming where PC takes a back seat to consoles and a time when console games are ported to PC. A big example is Iron Man it was ported from the PS2.
I think the ignorance isn't ignoring pirating but not knowing or seeing the full picture.
Sacred did well in Germany, no offense to the German but that is one of the major hacking countries around.
That's some great math there.
Because people might buy the game, and get fed up with the restrictions, and get a crack of the game or something.
Bioshock came out August 21, 2007 for pc and XBOX 360 in America and the 24th for Euro
from the official Bioshock website
and why are they bawing when they sold 1.5mil
Me, I'd be bawling too.
There's obviously no reason to take the sane route and aggressively price the game and making it as easy to buy as possible. I was thinking of buying this game if they were smart and sold it in some kind of package deal with the original. But if they're gonna be dicks about it, I don't really care and I'll pirate it at best.
All these fuckers need to listen to Brad Wardell and focus on selling to who's going to buy your game, instead of trying to keep out who isn't.
They do have a right to be pissed because their game has been pirated. What I really think they should do is move into console development instead, and indeed sell their engine to others to help their costs. When they are free of PC development and on more secure consoles, where even an import copy of their game would still count as a sale, so they could make their games region free. This would appease a lot of fans and encourage sales, while clamping down on piracy.
When Crytek end up leaving PC town, for the bright lights of console development (I know they are already looking at PSP development), only then will PC gamers think of what could have been and lick their wounds.
If you decide to, good luck selling the Crytek engine, I'm sure you'll get lots of buyers, and make up any losses from piracy.
Crysis was a mediocre FPS wrapped in a pretty shell. All the reviewers played it on $5000+ rigs that Crytek supplied, and reviewed it on how good it looked. I built a brand new $2500+ rig for Crysis and couldn't run it on very high, that's a joke.
Once you peel back the graphics, it's just another crap FPS with a really piss-poor story, and AI with the IQ of lettuce. The driving sections were worthless, the save system is annoying, and the worthless suit only had enough power to use it once a fight.
And the sad part is I actually bought it, lol.
@ Cowboy TTop - "When Crytek end up leaving PC town, for the bright lights of console development..."
First of all Crytek's next game (not the Crysis expansion) is coming out on consoles and PC, they've already said that a million times to hammer home how bad us PC gamers are. Of course they had to cut back the engine to do so...
And second, please feel free to take Crytek for your console exclusivity orgasm. They're engines are decent, but they can't make a game worth a damn, and us PC gamers have plenty of better FPS engines already.
So how do you make more sales? I idea is to make a decent game first and not worry so much about the graphics (its this latter that put Crysis in this mud. The second is to encourage sales by the extras method of thought, buy a copy of Crysis and get a limited edition Crysis character model and artbook. These tactics do work on consoles an should be encouraged on selling PC games too. I don't know, maybe go as far as sticking special hidden codes on those models, which you can only see once you've purchased it. Special weapons and goodies could be given through each unique code.
Lastly, keep the game open. It's clear it will be cracked at some point, if you lock it up in DRM etc. Perhaps developers should also add game cracking to their development cycle too.
If your well developed, original game is the hot shit, gamers will sit up, take notice and buy. This is the most important thing to remember. Crysis perhaps wasn't that and looked sweet but average.
Every person I know who has a cracked copy of the game got one because they wanted to see how the game was, and didn't trust the company enough to just buy it.
There's your problem.
1:20 piracy rates mean 30 million people played Crysis. There are barely 30 million PCs that can play Crysis comfortably, christ.
Claiming to pirate a game just to "try it to see if I like it" is nothing more than a lame excuse. I played the demo of Crysis to know I didn't like it all that much.
With all the Xboxes, Playstations and Wiis out there that have been modded, why aren't other companies complainging about piracy?
Because Crytek are pussies.
What is annoying is when import games are painted along with copies as being bad, when both are different beasts. This is a card Sony love to play a lot.
All those games we love that get demos are a good chance to decide on buying a game, but not every game has that luxury.
Don't listen to me though. Go make your games only for consoles and then wonder why you still aren't selling a bajillion copies... I'll just be over here playing Galatic Civ 2.
Piracy is also a weak scapegoat for poor sales. It's fairly obvious that the diminishing sales of PC games are due to the increasing dominance of console gaming. As one platform becomes incredibly popular, it makes sense that the other would lose some ground. I think a lot of people just aren't willing to commit to the PC as a gaming platform. Thus, if a game interests them, they download it instead of buying.
Crysis has sold over a million copies so he is say 20 million people are playing Crysis. Yeah right, I bet their all playing it on very spec too.
Let's say it were 1:1 like photoshop, the people who want to be a program buy it. The people who don't want to buy it don't buy it. If there was no way to pirate it, people would just use/play something else. The extra copies they would sell is negligible.
Potential Sales are NOT SALES. These is what these jackasses always do when talking downloading ( cause its NOT piracy, in legal terms outside the US piracy means there has to be an actual profit, like people in Asia walking into a store to pay actual money for copies or games ).
I sincerely hope amerians snap out of at least this tiny part of their mental conditioning so here it is one more time, one more cry on deaf ears: Potential Sales cannot be counted as lost sales. There is NO PRODUCT whatsoever that can sell to 100% of the people who are remotely interested, they are lucky if they manage to sell to 5 or 10% to people who are moderately interested and that would be any salesman's wet dream to consistently have that sales ratio.
You never see "Oh yea we have 10 copies downloaded for ever 1 copy we sell, out of those 10 copies downloaded MAYBE 1 of those would have bought the game if he wasn't able to download it". That would be a more realistic figure that corresponds with the reality of selling a product, not "We lost 10 sales cause 10 people downloaded".
And if that doesn't sounds so incredibly retarded to you then you need to read it again and comprehend it cause you are just not getting it or you just don't wanna get it.
Ah, forgot you can play imported games with a modded system. But still, I'm sure some of those ppl aren't that entirely honest.