Crytek says PC piracy reaches staggering numbers |
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| BY Adam Sandberg Jun. 30th, 2008 | More on: |
Game developer Crytek recently said that it will be impossible for them to produce PC-exclusive titles in the future because of massive piracy, and things don’t seem to be getting any brighter on that front.
In a Crysis Warhead interview with IGN, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli says that Crysis’ low sales figures depend partly on bad marketing, but mostly on internet piracy. “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,” Yerli said.
1 to 20? I actually believe that number could be higher. Piracy is getting bigger and easier, even those with little knowledge in computers can download a newly released game, and that’s making it extremely hard for developers to release a PC-exclusive game with confidence. The question is, should the pressure on Internet pirates be higher, or should the game industry rethink and adapt?
If there’s a solution to this problem, it has to be a realistic one. Those in the piracy business are just as smart as those trying to stop them, and new preventative software/hardware is just going to make it harder, not stop them. People would probably be less likely to download illegal software if there was a legal alternative. If more games were available for download (for a lower price than when you buy it in the store), it would be a sign of progression and comprehension. Although this shouldn’t be needed in a perfect world, unfortunately we don’t live in one.
Of course, this isn’t a guarantee, and maybe people would keep downloading illegally just as much as before. This is why it is such a big problem, there’s no simple solution. What do you guys think, should we point the gun at the pirates or is this something that could be solved without bloodshed?
June 30th, 2008
at 10:19 pm
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.
June 30th, 2008
at 10:26 pm
Good point, making more games to consoles is one way, but is that really stopping the problem? Piracy on consoles is getting bigger, and what we see on PC today could perhaps be the situation for consoles in the future.
June 30th, 2008
at 10:50 pm
well the pc gaming companies should stop only coming up with 3 genrers of games and maybe people will bother buying their game
July 1st, 2008
at 3:22 am
MMO’s, RTS’s and… what? The First Person Shooters have moved to the consoles. It’s only two genres on the PC right now. The occasional Myst game doesn’t count.
July 1st, 2008
at 5:57 am
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?
July 1st, 2008
at 6:07 am
They started out poorly with about 85,000 copies the first month, but have now sold over 1 million copies.
Maybe the bad start was because of the high sys requirements.
July 1st, 2008
at 9:16 am
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.
September 15th, 2009
at 1:49 pm
GAME PIRACY DOES NOT HURT SALES AND GAME COMPANIES KNOW IT!
This is closely related to the DRM issue.
I look at the piracy issue this way and I believe companies do too but they won’t admit this to you:
Piracy doesn’t hurt companies one bit and they know it. If they make 1 million copies of a game at a set price and they send to market all 1 million, they figure how much cash they stand to make on those games. If they reach their target number of sales, the company considers that game a success for them.
Now lets say another 1 million copies were pirated. This is great for the game company because they get more exposure and chances are better than not that sometime in the future some of those folks will purchase a game from that company. It’s free advertisement. None of those pirated games will cause the game company to lose one penny of those targeted 1 million sales because for every kid who has a pirated game there will always be one willing to buy the game off the shelf. Thus they get all the money they were after. The game companies know this.
The marketing divisions also know the psychological factor involved. If you tell a person he can’t do something he’s more likely to try to do it anyway. I am not saying they want pirated games but they know if a million people refuse to purchase the game and decide to download it free instead, they will have this much more free advertisment.
Some people try to make the claim that the game companies deserve to get paid for the copies of pirated games and are thus losing money. This is totally silly. As an example, people download songs off the radio all day long and pass copies to their friends. The music companies don’t figure on getting paid for this, so they don’t worry about it. They worry about the sales of CD’s they send to market. The game industry is no different. The argument goes like this:
If we (the game company) can stop people from pirating our games (by DRM or anti-piracy technology or what have you then we can put out more game copies and get paid for them. Again this is silly. If the game company wanted to make 2 million sales why didn’t they just produce another 1 million copies for market in the first place? They want to make free money on your work. Your machine makes or downloads the copy and gets the copy to a consumer (you). They don’t have to spend money on making the copy and shipping it to the store and advertising for you to buy the game. You have done all that work for them and they are just mad they can’t make EXTRA money off of you they never accounted for in their targeted sales, in the first place!
It can be said for that very reason the company does not deserve the extra money because they haven’t done the work and spent the money to provide the person with THAT COPY.
Yes, this may be illegal but it does not hurt the games sales. Because of this I heavily dispute the decision to make this a crime as there is no real basis for it. It would be like the music industry saying O.K. folks now we are going to charge you for all the songs you downloaded off of the radio, and oh by the way, if we catch you with a CD of radio recorded songs you’re going to jail! You never hear the music industry claim they lose money because people record songs off of the radio because they know this does not hurt their intended targeted CD sales.
Only if a semi truck with 50,000 copies ran off a cliff and the games were destroyed on the way to market, would they lose any money.
This to me is very logical. Even in America we are surrounded by media propaganda every day and we just fail to see it. The game industry has yelled for so long now that piracy hurts their sales that we have come to believe it like sheep. They are then able to use this and other means to justify things like a heavy DRM.
You show me any study that proves 100% beyond any doubt that because a game is so heavily pirated it kept people from walking into a store and buying a game off the shelf and for that reason alone a company could not reach their targeted sales, I will kiss your feet in public on National TV. Come on, that’s laughable. It can’t be done. For a company to expect me to swallow that bull, means they haven’t really thought it through.
Bottom line, the Piracy issue is a fallacy made up to force us to accept a companies right to control the use of their product anyway they see fit. Of course they have the right to do that anyway with their product, but this way they will have the mainstream popular consensus on their side, and that means less hassle for the company, which would cost them money. They always feel they have to justify their changes in the product because consumers don’t like it. They are only hurting themselves more than the pirates ever could.
Remember, Don’t use pirated material as it IS as of now against the law. I just felt the need to share these thoughts as I don’t think the issue has been examined enough by the general population.