Crytek's CEO: Piracy Threatens PC Exclusivity

[wraggster]

Tucked into a wide-ranging interview with IGN is this nugget from Cervat Yerli, the CEO of Crytek, developer of Crysis:


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. I hope with Warhead I hope we improve the situation, but at the same time it may have an impact on [our] PC exclusivity in the future.

http://kotaku.com/5020530/cryteks-ceo-piracy-threatens-pc-exclusivity

[AngelicLiver]

Perhaps Crytek and EA should look back on Crysis a little more critically. For all the pretty bells and whistles it didn't do anything revolutionary. Sure it looks stunning but being such a system hog it wasn't accessible to the average gamer, other games with more scalable engines such as Unreal 3 and the Source engine faired far better last year.

Also since the conception of HD console gaming I'd imagine it's hard for the average consumer to justify spending £500+ on a relatively decent gaming PC. TVs are bigger, consoles offer a similar/identical experience and high street retailers still rip-off customers on shoddy PC pre-builds that couldn't run half these games.

Overall I'm sure the situation is grossly exaggerated. EA should get round to fixing and optimising Crysis before they start lashing out over dreadful sales. It's not like they can accurately monitor piracy either. It's all corporate spin and scaremongering. Make your games accessible and scalable and people will buy them EA, please refer to any Blizzard game, Half-Life 2 or the Unreal 3 games.

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/1694/trainingpgcryingrl0.jpg

[goity]

Ridiculous. They can't honestly believe 20 million people have a computer that can play crysis, let alone actually did.
There is a problem with piracy on PC, but saying it's to that extent is ridiculous.