2404 - PC Gaming - Crytek Not A PC-exclusive Developer Anymore; Blames Piracy

Crytek Not A PC-exclusive Developer Anymore; Blames Piracy

Posted by Chris April 30, 2008

One of the last PC-exclusive developers have officially stated that they will expand to the console platforms. In a recent interview, Cevat Yerli, Crytek's president cited rampant piracy as the number one reason:

"It is certainly. We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore."

This is obviously very distressing news about the state of the PC market as a whole, but at the very least, Crytek will probably have to scale their engine down so that it works on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. That in turn means Crytek's next game won't have system requirements that require the power of the sun. Hopefully.

Reader Comments:

Björn - Posted Apr 30 2008 2:19 am (ET)

Crytek is wrong about this. Is piracy a PC exclusive thing? No. I highly doubt that piracy is really their problem - I think it's more along the lines of the system requirements. Why build a game that only a small percentage of the community is going to be able to enjoy?! I didn't buy the game because the demo ran poorly on my machine, and my components are pretty new.

Piracy is always going to be around. The developers just have to realize that they will have to deal with it. I don't hear Valve and a lot of other major PC developers complaining.

On the other hand, I really don't mind if they branch out to the consoles as long as they don't give us a console port.

Chris - Posted Apr 30 2008 2:00 pm (ET)

Well, Valve digital distrubution method grants them 100% profit for every game sold and Blizzard has been synonymous with quality for the past decade and their name has only gotten stronger over the years, because of how much a lot of their games are still being played today.

But you're right, Crtyek was shooting for a limited audience and Crysis went onto sell over a million copies. That's nothing to complaing about. I don't believe piracy is killing the PC industry, but piracy does skew the perceptions of PC developers of what piracy is doing and that's what really worries me.