Crytek drops PC exclusives News

See? You're only hurting yourselves, you filthy scoundrels.

I would love to play Crysis, but simply my computer is not powerful enough to run it at an acceptable rate. Thats the perk with consoles, you see a game, and you know its going to work. It must be hard to make real solid profit in the PC market on top notch games like that. Piracy of course does not help either.

I can't discuss this on three places at once, just saying it should be remembered that Crysis sold far more than a million by now, before people remember the false 80k figure.

I think the reason why piracy is so rampant for this game is that people aren't willing to pay £30 for a game that will most likely run terribly on their PC. People are more likely to accept the horrendous frame rate if they don't actually pay for the game. I bought Crysis, but only because I had upgraded my PC about a month before it came out.

while i'm not disputing the fact that piracy is a problem in the pc world, i'm be highly doubtful that it is the sole reason for the the failure of crysis.

i'd have loved to have played it, but i imply didnt have a computer that would do it justice. When i have a new pc, then i'll buy it.

While i applaud their ability, the crytek team may have been better served creating a game that would work well on all machines

If they implemented Awesome Muliplayer with keycodes it would cut down piracy quite a bit.

A single player only game is an easy target.

Solution. 1984..

Make all users login to play the games, accounts created with username/email tracking. Exes not given on discs but downloaded from servers. Random check online for the exe. No more CD checks!

If found to be pirating then account closed, user has to grovel to explain why it appears they pirating.

Simple and effective

So.......steam then?

Hmm `steam like` i guess.. iron out the kinks etc..

Am sick of hearing people whinge about copy protection, if they are legit whats the problem.. i totally understand the CD check is a pain, hence if we could get rid of that and replace with online check thats fine by me.

aye cause xbox 360 games are never pirated on the internet are they...

It's society's problem:

If you're the sort of person who walks around in sportswear and/or primark and eats beans and sausages from a can you won't think twice about pirating a PC game.

Beans and sausages from a can + toast + grated cheese = delicious


Crytek should maybe have made a better game that is playable on more than about 10 peoples PCs.

jamespo -

Ask anyone who works with me and they'll tell you i have great ideas how to handle them, but apparently they would breach civil and human rights, bah

Wyrm -

Still doesnt give people the right to `steal` the game just because they `protest` about its spec requirements!!

What are the sales figures for Crysis anyway? Because I don't find other PC developers (Valve included) complaining about piracy.

I think the fact that even today there are few computers in this world capable of running Crysis properly has a lot to do with it. I am not defending piracy here, but I think Eraysor's argument applies here.

Eraysor -

Thats what demos are for? check it works before you buy it?

I've heard all the excuses on our official forums where people say `i only pirated it to see how it works, but got so hooked playing it thru i finished it in a few day so dont need to buy it now .. etc etc blah.`oh and the classic `i didnt find a demo, or there wasnt a demo so i stole it anyway`

Yes not all games have demo's, but if they are able to pirate the game, then they have the INTERNET so can easily read reviews/reports about people saying if it works or not properly

Crysis was actually a very average game in pretty wrappings. Unfortunately the wrappings were unusable on even high powered machines if you wanted to play at your LCD's native resolution. In the old days of CRT resolution was nowhere near as big a problem as it is on lcd.

I don't want to dismiss piracy as a problem for PC gaming, but in the case of Crysis I'd bet that the far greater barrier to them getting bigger sales is the fact that the game is so demanding in terms of PC hardware.

There are loads of PC gamers out there, but very few of them have the sort of cutting edge gaming rig necessary to play Crysis on High or Very High settings, and I really wouldn't blame anyone for giving the game a miss if their system is clearly incapable of running it at that level, since the graphics are a major part of the appeal. Yes, Low and Medium graphical settings were available, but they looked rubbish.

As a PC gamer, I do value the creative contribution of developers like Crytek who really strive to push the boundaries of PC graphics forwards and I enjoyed Crysis a lot. Problem is, I did spend £830 on a new gaming PC recently (not just for Crysis, but it was certainly in my mind when ordering it) and not everyone is in a position to do that.

Nobody's stealing anything. By that logic it's stealing to rent or borrow a game from a friend.

That'd dumb Crytek. Dumb reason. Do what Stardock do: REWARD THE CUSTOMER!

Have patches and updates requiring registration of game, sorted.

Sins of a Solar Empire is best selling RTS atm, no protection on it. Pirate v1.0 if you want, but online and getting patches and big free content updates? Yeah, register the game. It works, Sins is selling well!

Steam distribution. Even boxed copies with steam functionality wired in; that should solve quite a bit of the piracy problem.

But in a weird sort of way, I see this as good news. The CryTech are incredibly skilled at making awsome game engines. If they focus that talent and energy on making stuff that will run on the consoles, we'll not only get more competition for the Unreal III engine and other established platforms, it is also likely that the crytech would be able to squeeze the juice out of the so-called "next gen" a lot faster - both systems still have a lot to offer in terms of untapped power.

Personally, I'd like to see CryTech develop a PS3 specific engine which really gets that alien architecture and draws every scrap of power from it, and makes it available for other developers to licence. Could make for some games it would not be possible to realize on the 360 (unleash the power of teh cell!), and everybody will agree that it is a good thing if the PS3 can be all it can be et cetera.

ianegg -

You dont rent pc titles, well not from blockbuster etc. so thats a mute point there.

As for `borrowing`, thats a different thing, if you both running at same time then yes you are in theory in breach of the EULA since most games will state that only 1 copy can be ran simultaneously etc, and the copy protection system if disc based would have had to be `got around` to play it. i know of SOME games that allow a second client to run etc

Obviously if you borrow the game and have the discs and ya the only one running it then obviously thats fine, the consumer can do what they like with the code once they've bought it, within the rules of the EULA.

As i said before the whole piracy debate is totally ignored by a lot of people as they DONT see it as a problem or an issue. So talking to those type of people is a waste of bits on the net.

I would love to have played this game, but my PC is simply not up to the job. They haven't sold the game engine to other developers like iD/EPIC did with the Quake/Unreal engines and so I'm not as tempted to pay the cash to upgrade my machine. It is just one game at the end of the day, regardless of how pretty it is.

I do not beleive piracy to be the problem it is made out to be. Sure it's much more of an issue on consoles and I'm sure it does hurt sales. Why people don't realize that pirating games may lead to having no games to pirate is beyond me. But at the same time one pirated game does not equal one lost sale. People will pirate a game when it's free that they might never have paid for.

But the other problems are performance related. I have a high end system, which at the time of Crysis release was about as good as you could buy and I could not run the game on full graphics (DX10) at 1680 x 1050 at anything above 18fps or so. I had to turn down some effects. True the game looked still looked stunning, but it doesn't look good for people with lower hardware. Worse the 9800 cards are not much of an improvement over the 8800 so the game still cant be run on max unless you start looking at SLI. People want to play something close to the screen shots on the back of the box, not a graphically butchered version of the game. Game development costs to much to just only cater to the high end market.

Second problem is integrated graphics. They need to stop being shit. Motherboard manufactures need to start installing graphics hardware than can at least make a half decent attempt at running the latest games. And they also need to be truthful when selling multimedia/familly PC's. 9/10 these will not run any recent games, which many claim they do.

PC gaming is just in a bit disorganized at the moment, but imo it wouldn't take much to improve the situation.

And don't give me the WoW argument. A developer isn't going to care how much money WoW makes if they can't make anything on their own games. The PC is my platform of choice, but I still think a lot of improvements can be made.

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis."

Shouldn't that be "We are suffering currently from the lack of PC's able to run Crysis."

Making the latest, greatest, most graphically cutting edge games is a nice bragging point, but if people can't run the damn thing on their PC's they aren't going to buy it.

All this is showing is that there is a corrolation between people who spend a truck load of money to keep on the cutting edge of gaming hardware and those that pirate games... wait that can't be right, can it?

@jaywalker3010

That's true, but like the whole debacle with music downloading it's not actually stealing. It's a completely different problem that has to be solved creatively, as in hiddenranbir's example of SoaSE or Valve's approach.

Nobody is stealing anything here, and nobody is actually "pirating" either - apart from the people who are stupid enough to actually pay for illegal copies of games/cds/dvds. The definition of "pirating" has obviously changed in recent years, but it still has far worse connotations than the actual problem at had.

I don't know if you follow the news about the MPAA, but they're a perfect example of how crying about people "stealing" and not adapting is more detrimental than the "piracy" itself.

The question people should be asking themselves here is what possible motive could Cevat Yerli possibly have for saying anything other than the truth. Everyone is all so full of disbelief, but there is nothing I have read here that doesn't make perfect sense.

Fir off, the motives that drive people who pirate games is not relevant, at all. I know that sounds a bit odd, but for the discussion at hand its just not.

The bare fact is that piracy is much more prevelant on the PC platform. When making business decisions about how to get the best return for their investment, Crytek will look at how much money they lose to piracy

Now why people pirate PC games might be of interest to the extent that they chat about it over lunch, but when examining their cashflow it ceases to be of relevance. Crytek are in the business of making games for profit. They are not in the business of understanding and correcting the ills of society.

The conversation might have gone like this.

"We lose loads of money to piracy on out PC games. We need a solution."
"I wonder why people pirate PC games so much."
"Who cares. If we start making console games, we will stop losing so much dosh."
"Good idea. Job done. Lets eat."

No doubt some people will level accusations of greed at Crytek for this decision. Such people are idiots.

The absolute truth here is that we did it to ourselves. All that tosh about "we wouldn't pirate it if the tech requirements are lower" is just apologist nonsense (and tbh makes the writer look either simple or deluded). If PC games didn't get pirated so much, PC gaming wouldn't be dying (its not dead anytime soon, but it is in decline, fact).

No big loss here. I'm not willing to pay full price for a game that I will have to play on low settings eventually. Also, I really don't think that Crysis is the big revolution that Crytek was talking about prior to its release. Gameplay is solid but nothing special. Stalker on the other hand IS that revolution and it doesn't even need such a killer machine to run nicely.
The truth hurts - competition on the PC when it comes to FPS is so brutal that only the best survive. Not so much on consoles where FPS games are a rather fresh thing. However I wouldn't be surprised to see a very similar situation there when the next gen of consoles are released in a couple of years. Looking forward to Stalker - Clear Sky which I WILL buy.

Sick of FPS games anyway, go crying to the consoles for big money. Leave the PC for the indie developers for more originality in games.

Just to be clear, I'm against piracy, I'm just sick of FPS games.

Stop defending thiefs please, there's no excuse.

If someone is playing the game and havent paid us for it, then its pirated/stealing. You have a product you are using you have not paid the owner for. Theres no other way to explain that away as NOT stealing/pirating.

You dont walk into a car showroom and drive off with a vehicle cos you want it. Yes you can get a test drive to `check it out` but if you drove off without paying you'd be arrested for Grand Theft Auto (sorry had to get a pun in there)

Simple analogy i know but you get what i am getting at.

I think its safe to say MOST people think its okay to play games without paying for it for some reason or other. In a small way its actually nice to know your games wanted enough to be pirated, imagine if you spent 2 years working on a game only to find its not cared about enough for people to crack it :)

What is it they say about arguing on the internet?

Olemak wrote: "Personally, I'd like to see CryTech develop a PS3 specific engine which really gets that alien architecture and draws every scrap of power from it, and makes it available for other developers to licence"

I think they're heading in the right direction with their game engine CryEngine 2, which is being ported to the PS3 and 360. From the beginning, they have spoken about optimising their engine for both 360 and PS3, therefore trying to get the best out of each.

"Could make for some games it would not be possible to realize on the 360.."

The consoles are too close in terms of power for that to happen, but I really do look forward to seeing the results of CryEngine2 based games running on both consoles. :)

For the record, I HAVE played Crysis at 14 FPS on my Core 2 Duo / 8800 GTS equipped system. Despite everything it is a stunning achievement. I even enjoyed the latter alien levels. I am re-starting it at the veteral level.

Point is, Crysis' failings are no greater or lower than any other top-notch FPS. That above-average shooting gameplay is topped by hitherto unseen graphics and a stunning (sort of) open world. What more do people want? And for heaven's sake, this is Crytek's only SECOND game - why do we expect Valve-level storytelling from them is beyond me.

What saddens me is that this effectively cancels out the further two games in the planned trilogy, and with it, Crytek's chance to address the complaints hurled at it. It is a sad moment for PC gaming (for whatever reason), make no mistake about it.

Nobody's stealing anything. By that logic it's stealing to rent or borrow a game from a friend.


Please. Just don't. Pretty, pretty please.

You wouldn't steal a carrrrr!

Crysis was actually a very average game in pretty wrappings

pfff, very average my arse

Don't know why it would be so hard to port to console. It supported the 360 pad out of the box. Throw in a little autoaim, set the detail to medium and you're ready to go.

Crysis sold over a million copies AFAIK.

And I would guess that there are a lot more 360s out there than there are Crysis - capable PCs.

I wonder how many of the people that pirated it found that it ran like crap and deleted it after 5 mins?

Well blimey, you've all gone on about piracy but when I read this news all I could think about was :-

YAY! Crytek are going to be doing console games! W00T!

"I wonder how many of the people that pirated it found that it ran like crap and deleted it after 5 mins? "


There was a demo, prior to the release, you know. Not much need to download several GBs just to find out it doesn't run.

Hmmm...

I always notice that companies complain constantly about piracy, despite having copyright protection(Starforce, Securom, whatever) attached to their products.

They never seem to put two and two together and realise that these programs simply do not work, and make the end-user's experience arbitrarily shittier.

Also, Jamespo: I don't think you were being serious, but you kinda hit on a point here. The kind of people you describe would probably not care about pirating games because they can't afford them anyway.

And finally, piracy is not theft. Everyone peddles out the whole "piracy is theft" line like it automatically summons a magical high horse for them to sit on so they can look down upon all the dirty unwashed masses of software pirates. Technically it's copyright infringement, not theft, as nobody else is deprived of the product you have acquired without payment. If Yogi The Swedish Pirate downloads Crysis tomorrow, there is not some poor little boy across the other side of the world that's had his game magically taken away from him through the evil power of bittorrent. Thus, it is not technically theft.

Copyright Infringement doesn't sound so bad to your average person though, so the companies involved like to call it theft to try and attach a social stigma to it. This doesn't make it actually the case.

To use the apparently universal car analogy: It's like walking into a car dealership, finding one you like, then pressing a button to create an exact duplicate to it and driving away in your newly cloned car.

Yeah, sure, piracy my ass.

What the hell did they expect with those requirements?.

If they want to sell more since any POS game sells a lot on consoles, just say so. Don't blame piracy.

What the hell did they expect with those requirements?

That people who have the specs to run it and enjoy it buy it, instead of downloading it? Read the article, ffs.

Shouldn't that be "We are suffering currently from the lack of PC's able to run Crysis."

No, it shouldn't. The Crysis guys are well aware how many people with great PCs are torrenting this game.

Nithron -

Hehe point taken about the definitions, but as you said people have even less care for Copyright infringement so by giving the theft tag gives it a bit of an edge.

Simple definition means we not getting paid for the work we've done.

Oh and about the car thing. Clone or not it still a `product` you dont own :) China is king of `cloning` :) its still copyright theft ;)

Its not legal! :)

@ianegg

It beggers belief that people don't believe that downloading music, games or videos they haven't paid for or got the owners permission to use is not stealing. Under what possible belief system is it not stealing ?

If you walked into a shop and walked out with a boxed copy in your pocket without paying for it, would that not be stealing ? How is that any different to downloading off the internet.

The fact that people have convinced themselves that this is different, doesn't stop it from being theft. Yes the whole content production industry does (and some parts are) need to get creative about how to address it, but again that doesn't stop it from being stealing. Moaning that the industry is not embracing the technology fast enough for you, doesn't change the fact it is stealing.

You can have valid discussions about what the correct way for the industry and public as a whole to move forward is, but you cannot change the facts that taking anything without consent is stealing.

I'm sure selling over a million copies used to be an achievement. In fact, it's more than EA predicted. Hardly a "failure" really.

p.s. I believe the legal argument is that under the Theft Act 1968 it's not stealing, because you're not "permanently depriving" anyone of anything.

But morally, it's stealing, really.

Katsumoto -

A theft act from 1968? wow did that cover things like wirelesses and world cup winner booklets ;)

I think an act from 40 years ago is a little unable to cover the modern day :)

My humble opinion:

1.Pc piracy is ridiculously easy-download a game,apply crack,and go
360 is also pirated to hell and back,but you need to open it,loose warranty,buy discs,and most important fear of being banned from live.
2.Integrated graphics in laptops,it is a bit pathetic that people can't play 4 years old games on them(yes intel i am looking at you),of course you can't upgrade them=fail
3.Extreme hardware requirements
4.Marketing,what pc game has halo3,gta 4 style marketing?
5.Loyalty,console gamers are much more loyal bunch,with pc it's always intel-amd,nvidia-ati,lol he has geforce 8400...

"permanently depriving" anyone of anything."
okeee..., so is it "borrowing" ? I mean, one can put it back, and it'd make it ok. In 1968 I doubt that intelectual digital property existed.

Anyway, I've quit PC gaming long time ago, but I still and always depise piracy. Some of you (no judging, though) believe that piracy is not so bad, and such (PC gamers, I presume), please..., do continue, and you'll kill it for good. Like it or not, this buisness is to make money, this is not the "comune of Paris" or "Moscow 1917".