Basic human nature, why pay when its “free”. I don’t think cracking down on pirates is going to get anything done (for perspective, check out the war on drugs). Personally, I think they should continue to produce PC games, but make console versions that have more/exclusive (read: compelling) content too. Yes that excludes a portion of the market and there could be some piracy of the console version, but at least it provides an incentive for people to not get the pirated PC version.

well the pc gaming companies should stop only coming up with 3 genrers of games and maybe people will bother buying their game

everything is pirated, from music, movies and games to cloths jewelry brands them selves.

there will be no way to stop such activity.

but what id like to know is the figures of profit made on each title.

if thers already huge profit after expenses and before piracy is included. why wouldnt you still make the game anyway?

did crytek make loss?? or are they just saying ” bad sales”

as in they wanted more then and are now sulking?

Let me first say that I believe piracy to be damaging to gaming. If nobody pirated games, we would have more games on the market. And those games would cost less. But I also don’t believe that you should be taken out back and shot for downloading a pirated copy of a game.

I do not know where Mr. Yerli gets this 15:1 ratio of pirated vs. sold copies. From what I read he simply looked at the number of times Crysis was downloaded via Bittorrent or other P2P networks.

But I doubt he subtracted the people from poorer countries, or countries where Crysis is not widely available. Or where international copyright isn’t honored. Everyone in Russia who has the game probably pirated it. Same thing about many Asian countries, I suppose. So even if the worldwide ratio of pirated vs. sold copies is 15:1, I doubt it is the same for the USA and Western Europe.

If he is so sure that piracy hurt sales, he should publish a report of the research he has done. I believe that if his findings were correct, that report would have quite an impact on the gaming community.

So I agree that piracy is a problem. But I doubt that piracy hurt sales of Crysis to the degree that he believes. First of all, Crytek’s first game, Far Cry, was also released for the PC. And I think they were quite happy with sales, although that game was probably pirated as much as Crysis. So I believe that a good game is going to sell well on the PC despite piracy.

Second, there were several factors which I believe hurt sales that had nothing to do with piracy.

As Mr. Yerli admitted himself, the marketing campaign wasn’t all it could have been. I don’t recall the game being marketed as well as CoD or Bioshock. Not nearly as well. If I remember correctly, Far Cry fared well due to good word-of-mouth. At the time it was released, it really featured new gameplay elements. I beat it a couple of months ago, shortly after Doom 3, and I can safely say that Far Cry is a much better game, in many aspects. There was no game similar to Far Cry at the time of its release. Even the setting, a tropical island, was brand new for FPS at the time.

Things were very different when Crysis was released. It competed directly with Call of Duty 4 (CoD 4) which was released about a week earlier. And three months before we saw the release of Bioshock, which garnered a lot of positive press.

At the time of its release, Crysis was believed to be unplayable on basically all regular PCs. And Crytek did little to debunk that myth. So when you are standing at Best Buy (or Media Markt, if you live in Germany) and you have a copy of Crysis in one hand, and a copy of CoD 4 in the other, with the latter winning the Best Graphics of E3 2007 award while having lower system requirements, I believe you may just side with CoD 4.

CoD 4 was also a multi-platform release. So due to economies of scale, it’s reasonable to assume that their marketing budget was a lot higher than Crytek’s. Releasing both games at the same time may have hurt sales of Crysis.

Graphics aside, the story of Crysis, while good, may not have been as attractive to gamers as Bioshock’s epic tale of rapture. Crysis featured a generic setting with some new elements, while Bioshock offered something genuinely new. Even Call of Duty had a compelling story that may have appealed more to gamers.

So, Crysis at the time of its release faced strong competition from Bioshock and CoD 4. All three were major releases and targeted a similar demographic. I believe that many gamers may just have liked Crysis’ setting less, and also that fear of low frame rates may have tipped the odds in favor of its competitors.

That being said, Crysis has sold over 1.5 million copies since its release less than a year ago. Far Cry hasn’t sold that many copies up until now. That’s quite successful, I would say. And since the Crysis has enormous hardware requirements I think it will keep selling for a long, long time.

If piracy is as bad as Mr. Yerli assumes, he should enfore draconic protection measures that prohibit pirating the game, such as an active internet connection. Then every pirated copy would turn into a sale. Subtracting a generous 10% of lost sales due to people boycotting copy protection or that can’t run the game due to it, he should still look at a whopping 21.6 million copies sold. Ah what the hell, let’s say half the people don’t buy it because of the copy protection. That still means 12 million sold, almost ten times more than what he actually sold.