@KirbyMorph: "If piracy is the problem, why is it Starcraft, Half-Life 2, Warcraft 3, etc all have insanely high sales?"

Because piracy was not as widespread as now. Crytek's first game is not Crysis, it's Far Cry. It also sold well. Why do you think consoles get Battlefield: BC and PC gets Battlefield: Heroes? Times changed. Not only are consoles close to PC now in terms of performance, they have much less piracy (extremely low on 360 and Wii, inexistent on PS3). Throw in the problem of alienating low to mid-end PC users (let's wait for the SC2 and D3 specs shall we?) and consoles suddenly become a very attracting market.

slomo788

@dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased: Piracy doesn't run rampant on PC's because "people got other things to spend their money on," it runs rampant because it's so easy to do.

Like I said. I wish it was as easy to pirate on consoles as it is on PC's. Then I'd love to see all the excuses you people come up with as to why people steal. It's unbelievable the rationale that goes on for doing something illegal. Just because you can anonymously do it from your own home without anyone ever finding out. I wish some of you people would get some balls and go to a retail store and just steal the game from there rather than downloading it from the comfort of your own home.

Oh but I know I know, that's "different," isn't it? You guys amaze me, truly.

mva5580

Blizzard is pretty much the only developer left who hasn't jumped ship to join the Xbox360 and PS3.

Heyyou27

Crysis= whiny crybabies to me.

As for Stardock, they design their games intelligently, to make a profit, not to make the shiniest game possible. I didn't enjoy Sins at all, but GCII is great, and I'm waiting for their MoM-type game. Also, their non-game software gets pirated more then their game software.

The real problem is that too many gamemakers lack basic business sense.

arstal

I disagree. 90% of all PC games are NOT the same. Just the ones you feel are worth playing are the same. There's a whole bunch of stuff being done on the PC that nobody sees and/or nobody supports. People won't buy it 'cause they've never heard of it. There's a whole bunch of odd, quirky, unique titles out there, but people only want to buy Crysis, Guild Wars, WoW, the Sims, and whatever else has a marketing budget.

That being said, piracy runs rampant because people got other things to spend their money on. I buy most of my PC games (I just don't do the PC thing often anymore), but it's so easy to simply load up a torrent client and let the sucker go while you're at work. That leaves you with much more money to buy the latest trendy thing you saw on TV... or the bootleg equivalent.

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

Most probably downloaded to see if it could be played on their computer. Others were never going to buy it anyways and then there's the small percentage that just steal every game regardless of whether they like it or not.

If piracy is the problem, why is it Starcraft, Half-Life 2, Warcraft 3, etc all have insanely high sales? Oh wait, they're good games that don't alienate 99% of the PC public by making it so they can't run their games.

KirbyMorph

stop complaining and do decent games, then you may get paid.

sure the ratio is much higher than on consoles, because piracy for PC is so easy, sure we all know that. but that doesn't prove anything, it's not like every download is a sold game, I still bet that most people pirating a game wouldn't have bought it in first place, and they just get it now because they can have it for free, not because they really want it and are too greedy to pay for it.

infi

@xvitium: Stardock doesn't need to sell over a million copies just to break even.

I think Crytek might have had somewhat unrealistic expectations of how their game would sell, but it still has to hurt when you see the crazy number of copies being DL'd on a bitorrent site. I once saw as many as 300k downloads of Call of Duty around the time of its release at just one site. Regardless of what you might think, its something that shouldn't just be ignored.

darthnader

@StopTheOncoming: na,that´s not true at all,its many next to crytek who are moaning. Its pretty obvious that most developers who were pc centric developers in the past are switching to multi platform, actually there are few big developers/publishers left who are pc exclusive and those who are are usually doing subscription based or online delivery/advertising driven earning systems. For most newer non casual games either xbox 360 or ps3 is the lead platform.

@Raziel Dune: Sure many do that on consoles,too, but unlike on pc there´s still a bigger crowd who actually buys retail games.

@xvitium: i think they had a nice boost in their sales thanks to the we don´t copy protect stuff because we belive in our fans campaign. Sadly that doesn´t work out for each and every developer.

I think the problem there for Crytek is that the type of games they make is most played by the type of gamer on pc who knows how to pirate stuff easily and also does that a lot. See Mr. Ducksauce comment. If they were making sims type games for that audience they´d have less issues.

tomsamson

Piracy on the PC is as big a problem as it is due to two things:

1) 90% of all PC games released are the same. There is very little creativity or variance in the PC gaming scene at the moment. It's pretty much all FPS games, with the occasional FPS/RPG and every now and again an RTS. Instead of trying to be innovative in their run-of-the-mill FPS game, most developers just try to to push hardware sales, as apparently bleeding edge graphics are far more important than actually making something fun.

2) The anti-piracy schemes. While I acknowledge that they are put in place to stop piracy, then never work. Any single-player PC game that has been released, I can pirate if I so choose. Sure, I may have to wait until the day after it's released, but that's far preferable to the draconian anti-piracy software included in many games that actually makes it harder for paying customers to play the game (Mass Effect running out of installs just trying to get it to work is a recent example.)

In the end, it's easier to just pirate most PC games as very few are worth spending money on, and of the ones that are worth spending money on, half of them are rendered unplayable because of the anti-piracy measures.

jasu78

I could care less about exclusivity. Make the game for everything if you want. As long as the PC versions still have the options to make them look amazingly good I'll buy it.

PatMan33

@thefremen: Did you read the article? He's saying if you're not making online games, you have to go multiplat because of piracy. All the other devs/publishers you named are either multiplat or they make online games. Crytek don't. So your point just proves that they are right to complain.

slomo788

You guys have to remember that to hack a console, most of the time it requires some sort of hardware hack on top of the software. It's possible, but it's way more complicated than just torrenting some game.

DigiMish

@thefremen: Totally agree. I have pirated games that I know I will only play for a day because they are not worth the money. While a game like SoaSe or GalCiv2 from Stardock I know I will be playing for a long time and therefore is worth the investment of money. So I am not going to be buying NHL 08 on the PC b/c I may only play it for a day and therefore is not worth the 60 dollars. Many people pirated Crysis not for the gameplay or story but just to see what the graphics where like for a few hours and then never play the game again. It is for that reason that the game is pirated.

Spl1nter

So did they just pull that number out of thin air to justify why their mediocre-but-pretty FPS title with system requirements so high that it was the butt of gamer jokes for a while didn't sell terribly well or do they have, you know, some actual quality evidence?

God, it's a wonder that Valve and Blizz make any money at all with pirating so rampant!

And Sins of a Solar Empire. What a stupid little company for releasing a niche product on PC! The pirates have been just having their way with that upstart little company.

Wait what? They're doing okay too? Huh, must have something to do with having a real quality product. Crazy, huh?

Evdor

I bought crysis, my first game purchase for pc in a while. I'm a whole new man now! :D A poor man, but still a man!

chorx

I wish it was easy to pirate games on consoles as it is for PC's, so everyone could stop with their idiotic crying and near-justifications for why people pirate.

It's like everyone is so naive and stupid enough to believe that if EVERYONE who owned an Xbox 360 could pirate Halo 3 as easily as someone can pirate Crysis for PC, everyone would just be hunky-dory happy as shit to pay for Halo 3 rather than going online and taking a day or so to pirate it. Give me a freaking break.

mva5580

@StopTheOncoming: Actually...most PC developers who develop single player campaigns are complaining about this. The Crysis team has just been getting a lot of coverage about this lately because they are one of the few high profile single player PC developers left. Infinity Ward (of Call of Duty 4) was complaining about this about a month after release, and there was a slight dust up a couple of months ago when one of the THQ guys attached to Titan Quest mentioned piracy as a factor in the closing of Iron Lore.

@xvitium: Stardock is a single developer. It's good that they're able to survive despite the level of PC piracy, but even they have said they develop games specifically such that pirates don't want them. It should also be noted that they make a significant amount of revenue from standard software, not video games, and therefore are in something of a unique position compared to other developers. First Person Shooters seem to appeal to pirates a helluva lot more than 4X strategy games.

verrius

That sounds a bit... high. But then again, in my college days I don't think I paid for ANY of my PC games. So I guess it probably could be true.

That's, what, about 66500 per each million sold? Math was never my subject, so I may be off by a few... thousand... or so. Still, that's not THAT bad if you make a couple million sales. But for less, it sucks more.

Though I imagine it sucks regardless of how many you actually sell...

2NinjasTapedTogether

@Raziel Dune: -.- Why do people constantly say this.. Console pirating is WAY more difficult and foreign to a person than PC pirating, so it's done to a lesser extent.. Anyways, now that I'm done with that..

Who cares if Crysis goes to consoles, it wasn't really that much of a fun game, the only thing it really has going are the graphics...

All developers should really focus on now is making games that work on A LOT of computers and optimize them well.. That way, a broader potential market can be attained. Take Blizzard and Valve for example, they make games that look nice, but run well on a lot of computers, and most of all the games are good.. -.-..

Katorok

Console games have piracy issues too and no one is crying about it, i think they have to consider why the people don't want to buy their game, and not the ratio of piracy . Because that is not an actual indicator of anything ,wait, now that i think ... it's an indicator of how many people had access to the game and didn't like it enough to buy it

symphony_of_the_night

I think the reason piracy is such a problem for Crytek and not for Blizzard, Valve, EA or Stardock is because NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT TO PAY MONEY FOR ANOTHER STUPID GENERIC SCI-FI FPS RIGHT NOW.

Seriously, why would I want to play some shitty sequel to Far-Cry when I could be earning pyro achievements or PUSHING TINY CART or getting epics for my alts or any number of superior gaming experiences.

thefremen

Honestly, this is the way I've felt about PC pirating for years. If everyone just pirates the games, the companies that created it don't make shit for profit and it fucks up the development cycles for the next title they work on. The only time I believe pirating of games is ok is if the game is more than 20 years old, because those games should be freeware at this point in time (I'm looking at you VIRTUAL CONSOLE) so games like Doom and Monkey Island and Super Mario should just be readily accessible to the public for the sake that they are the games that started it all. But anyways,

I once again do not support game piracy, and have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on games over the course of my life, and intend to continue that. Now that that's out of the way, I'm off to go play some ROMS!

CitizenInsane27

@Mr.DuckSauce: If the next game doesn't have high spec requirement's and are graphically well then it would seem more would put forth money for it.

Mr.DuckSauce

I did not realize that everyone and their mom's computers, by Yerli's estimation, have the capability to run Crysis smoothly. Although I do admit, my 8800 GT runs it pretty well. And don't forget this entry:

"The perception that Crysis was a financial flop. (Hardly - the game sold nearly 1.5 million copies worldwide, says EA.)" [www.gamesradar.com]

Crytek is beginning to sound like the Metallica of the gaming world.

Crabfeast

Well, even if he's right or wrong, the effects of this can be seen. There's a reason why we have an endless stream of MMOs while games with singleplayer tend to have timed or permanent console exclusivity, and it's not just because of WoW's success or that PC gamers hate singleplayer.

Nirolak

Well, modchipping is a tad more difficult than a simple downlaod and keygen crack. It's an actual physical thing that you have to do so piracy rates are lower.

@StopTheOncoming: Exactly. I'm open to the idea that piracy may reduce game sales, but it's simply not true that 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale.

Mrclumpy

@Raziel Dune: I know right? The ratio of hacked consoles/phone is also 15-20 to 1!

slomo788

Contributing to piracy of crysis was the overwhelming hype of the desktop pushing specs that people wanted to try it out to test out it capabilities. Many people I knew had to try it out at playable frames of content and graphic's before actually thinking if it's worth the investment.

Investing to one game is not a good idea from a cash standpoint.

Mr.DuckSauce

so 20 million people are playing Crysis?

Ryumeka

Ask stardock how hurtful piracy is. None of their games have copy protection, and their games still sell very well.

xvitium

yes cause no one modchips their Consoles and steals games?
Cause no one Hacks their Cell Phones?

Raziel Dune

I see where they are coming from, but its only ever Crytek you hear complaining about this. I agree that piracy is a problem to an extent, but you shouldn't mix up piracy and just poor game sales. They should focus on making a game that no one would want to miss out on and would be happy to buy/support it. Not just a benchmark game for computers.

StopTheOncoming

Pretty harsh ratio

Ollivander

Go ahead, try to convince them. It's not going to work. Which is good anyway. I mean, the only reason you pirate and not buy their game is because it sucks right? Well cool! they shouldn't be making sucky games. Sucky games like CoD4 (not so much Crysis). So now they'll make more games for the 360 and not just for the PC.

I'm really all for this since if you don't pay for what you like, they just won't make more.

nou_phabmixay

I really fail to understand the logic of "Most pirates would never buy the game anyway, so it's not a loss for the developer."

If you want to play a game, buy it like the rest of us have to.

Kyouryuu

Its funny to hear comments from people who seem to not have liked crysis and still downloaded the full game and played it enough to give a serious comment on it.
Yeah, no, they couldn´t have downloaded a demo, it had to be the full game, also play it for a while, it sucked? Hm, Anyway, it was still worth playing obviously.
I personally didn´t like crysis a lot, so yeah, i neither bought it nor downloaded it, that easy.
Saying something is crap and doesn´t deserve your money but you went out and downloaded it to play it for a while for free is the same as pooping out your mouth. Keep the hot air for the toilet.

tomsamson

Or they could just go to steam or something..

JamieA

No one wants to look at how ridiculous the cost of a graphics card is. Especially with a game like Crysis. People spend hundreds on the equipment to just play the games so there's not much money left when it comes to buying them. I'm not saying that makes piracy ok, but it's an angle people seem to ignore. That doesn't even take into account how frustrating it can be dealing with drivers and updates on a PC for the average joe.

mugido

@tomsamson: I blame the fact that it usually has more content, and more features graphically... that's just me though.

chorx

You know, the people that put the money into a computer that could adequately run Crysis in all probability bought Crysis. I find it hard to believe someone spent a couple of thousand dollars to indulge a tech fetish would download the torrent.

I'd like to see the stats on the computers that are running the pirated version. It's probably not pretty.

futurebiblehero

I admit that i did pirate Crysis. But saying that me pirating the game had anything to do with me not buying it is not quite right. I had no plans to buy it before pirating it, because the only selling point it had for me, was as a Benchmark. And thats not a very compelling selling point at all.

I still buy games that i find worth it. Like The Orange Box, Oblivion, Call of Duty 4, Gish. And many more. Thinking that a Pirate download means a lost sale, is wrong.

The 15:1 ratio doesn't tell much about "possibly lost sales" since I and many others had no intent on buying the game in the first place.

Scarleth

To those who say companies like Valve or Blizzard don´t bitch about piracy you should maybe compare their business model with the one of other companies.
Not everyone can or wants to run a subscription fee based system or their own download app or do online mp games which can be controlled constantly.
Also yeah, obviously there are some game types which are more interesting to bittorrent fans and then others like sins of the solar empire which are not that interesting to such fellas. So yeah,doesn´t make much sense to say this or that company doesn´t moan about piracy so its no problem because enough others do.
With all the piracy going on and then also free to play browser games just a click away the pc market for non casual retail games is just shrinking more and more and yup, those who use torrents and still search for the reason on developer side instead of on their own are naive and yup, own fault when they have to wait for the next game they want to play 6 months cause its coming out on console first.

tomsamson

There is one big problem most developers face right now. Money is not infinitive, and money have not started to come up of nowhere, the game industry took big part of the cash that the music and movie industry got before.

Crytek is probobly one of the few companies who seriously belive that everyone who download there game can go up and just downright buy every game they want to play or give it a go.

I personal cannot, and I'm very selective on the games who actually get my $, If piracy stop this will be even more true and some games will probably have no sales at all, example Crysis, the most generic and crap shooter I played for the past 4 years.

MugiMugi

@I_Hate_This_Place: Exactly. The thread is more filled with people spinning it to say "Crysis sucked HL2 ruled!" than comments actually trying to reflect on a real problem. At this point it's not even a matter of morality (which is also important imo) but it's about the evolution of PC gaming. More companies will do MMOs and the amazing engines will migrate to consoles. I'm not a hardcore PC gamer myself but it has always been a great example to console games. It would be sad if Diablo 4 or HL2 episode 3 was exclusive to the 360...

slomo788

Really...

either make a game or stop making threats at your potential customers.

However if you release it with a ridiculous DRM scheme, I wont buy it.

axiomatic

Piracy is a problem, but I'd like to see where they arrived at that figure. Does it account for people who downloaded it and never would have purchased it? Does it account for people who downloaded it and then purchased the legitimate version? Does it account for those who were not interested in the companies products or franchises downloading it, enjoying the experience, and giving that company their business down the road as a result?

Reminds me of the way the recording industry throws out piracy figures.

Oceaniax

@slomo788: nah, piracy was widespread when hl2 and diablo 2 came out, maybe not as much as now, but still. And i'm betting SC2 and Diablo 3 will sell pretty well. Orange box did.
Besides both sc2 and diablo will require codes to play online, which most people will need to get the game for.

Tajfoon

"Piracy" isn't a valid excuse anymore, your ratios just like everything else on the internet was pulled out his ass

z0phi3l

Any company has every right to protect their investment. If they can't protect it the way they would like to, then they have every right to take their ball and go home. You deserve nothing for free, not even a test run if the company decides not to do a demo. It's a very simple set-up: If you want to play a game, you buy it(if no demo is available). Companies invest big $ into development, and if you decide you want to play it, you pay them. If you do not want to pay them for whatever reason(shitty game,no demo,past support,etc.), then don't play the game. Real simple here folks. No one should have to work for free, and by stealing games, you are stealing their pay-off from a risky investment that you yourself wouldn't/couldn't make. In the long run, the less return people make from their investments, the less they invest. Which is exactly what's going on here.

On another note, I am all for having a backup copy of something you BOUGHT. That doesn't mean your backup all of the sudden becomes shareware for the internet. It's your backup, nothing more.

I_Hate_This_Place

I really have no problem with developers who want to create on the consoles, as well. What's wrong with that? More people get to play their games, and they make more money. It DOES get annoying, however, when they decide to make games for the consoles and completely DITCH PC game development.

I look forward to the future when all games will be made for all platforms, and all platforms will be cross-platform. That is my perfect future.

LordMagnusMastah

The point I feel compelled to make is that console pirating, once the initial installation is completed (which can be bought along with the chip), very little usually has to ever be done again. Afterwards it pretty much "Just WorksTM". PC's suffer from patching problems, new anti-copy protection and invasive online reporting. I'd say being able to burn an ISO is less skillful than keeping up with current PC anti-piracy methods.
Here's the second point I wish to make: Piracy rarely equals lost sales. People who pirate will, 99.9% of the time, never ever buy the game in the first place. I'm happy to report that in the past, a little studio called Infinity Ward did something so incredible that I went out, after completing Call of Duty's singleplayer campaign and put down the cash for a copy of my own because it had to be played online. It was THAT DAMN GOOD. I can tell you after I climbed the hillside into Stalingrad, an IW developed CoD game was not allowed to be pirated. It was too awesome.
Crysis, was cool. I liked the suit. But they promised me no mutants. And inside we got ice aliens...It was Far Cry all over again. I was a little annoyed as I built this PC with Crysis in mind. And when push came to shove, WoW and Portal walked away with my cash. Because they offered that key ingredient: Awesome levels of fun.
The take home message here is "Suck Less and people will pay for your games"

Mattz

Pirates will always find a way.
Ramping up the copy protection only hurts the people who legally obtain the game. Look at Bioshock. The had all that SecuRom crap and made it hell for buyers, but you could find a torrent online for a version that was easier to run.

Coquiton

@chorx: yes, drms are sucky, some seem plain evil. I hate them too and yup, therefore would also try other options than using the most hated drms.Selling stuff via steam or doing games which are advertising driven or subscription based or yeah, ones which are released on consoles first.
hm..

several ones arguing for piracy here are saying its nonsense that every pirated copy equals a game that would be sold otherwise.
Of course its nonsense that one would have as many sales as pirated games if suddenly torrents wouldn´t exist anymore.
Nobody argues this seriously.
The problem is just that sales for certain "hardcore gamer" targetted games on pc meanwhile have so low sales numbers that its just not worth it anymore.
1.5 million sales for crysis may not seem as bad as the first week sales made one think initially but thinking about the long development phase and huge costs of it things look a bit different.
If i was at Crytek i´d either not develop highend bleeding edge pc games anymore either or yeah, at least tone the tech side down so much that i could release it on consoles first.
They could also sell their games on steam first and exclusively in the future with constant online validation, but yeah, dunno if their publishers would like that.

tomsamson

I don't pirate games, but companies like Blizzard and Valve have great business relationships with their users that offset (according to Valve) a lot of piracy issues. While there will always be people who pirate all forms of content, how many can honestly say they wouldn't feel like a dick pirating the Orange Box, or Starcraft II, instead of purchasing it? And if you can, shame on you.

A great example of what not to do is how Ubisoft handles their PC community. Both Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2 have long standing bugs that either take large periods of time to fix or simply never receive attention. Vegas 2, for example, had a network crippling bug that would cause the host's game to crash in certain circumstances. Unisoft was aware of the issue the first week but it took them around 3 months to issue a patch. When people smack down $60 for your game they expect it to work as intended; and if it doesn't, they expect it to be repaired in a timely fashion. In too many cases this doesn't happen. Instead of pointing the finger only at cheap gamers, take a look at what you're doing that works and doesn't work.

There are many ways around piracy, but threats, security features that piss people off (like Bioshock had) and plain old whining won't get you far. Make people think you care about them and most will love you back.

Replica23

Living in a third world country with more than a 98% of pirated software gives you a little perspective about these things. I'm just going to share with you how things look from over here.
I'm not trying to justify piracy but when you have no local support, no translations to regional language (for god's sake, Spain's Spanish isn't neutral and almost every Spanish speaking country can't stand the accent), no economical conversions (having a game cost three times PLUS shipping while earning less money than the countries for which the games are targeted isn't logical, different prices for different economies) and I'm not forgetting about companies actually making harder for people to buy games here (for example I wanted to buy a retail copy of the Witcher through Atari's site, but I just can't because they don't ship to my country. I know that games aren't made with these countries in mind because most companies doesn't profit from there, but you shouldn't be surprised when people in those countries pirate games.
Piracy is as much fault of the companies as of the people who download games.

And because it's always needed in this discussions: Stardock: Piracy and PC Gaming

Tikey

The fact is the issue is alot more serious with PC gaming and alot of companies have decided to stay away/ go multiplatform because of this. Sure you can mod your 360 but it is in the minority and there are restrictions in place such as preventing access to Xbox Live which in all fairness is a fairly large chunk of the Xbox experience.

I don't understand why there is such a huge rebellion against this topic, everyone was already aware of it and a good ammount of you have probably pirated games before. Claims are made that PC gaming is dying, can you question why?

Eon.

Crytek is just using Piracy as a excuse on why Crysis did not sell as well as they hoped. I have rarely hear anyone talking about this actual game. The only thing I hear about Crysis is can hardware x play Crysis on high. No one cares about the actual gameplay itself, the game is widely known as a benchmark and really a way to show off the graphics on a new PC.

Even in the quote they use the word probably when talking about the piracy ratios. So really the ratios are just numbers that the CEO of Crytek pulled out of his ass. I don't see how scapegoating piracy really helps here. I don't see how going to consoles is going to help Crytek because then they lose out on the high graphics edge which is basically the only thing their games are known for.

NullsRevenge

"PC gamers, stop pirating and start snitching on your friends if you want more exclusives out of Crytek."

I actually have no problems with more games coming to consoles. Flam... Pirate on !

Prime-Omega

Also, the romantacism of the stealing needs to stop. You are not "pirating" games, you are stealing. You are not some cool swashbuckler on the seas of the internet finding booty for everyone to enjoy; You are a thief. There is nothing glorius or wonderous about what you do, you steal. It's the along the same stupidity as someone stealing from a wal-mart display case. No matter how well you try to gussy up what you do to those around you, in the eyes of the law and anyone who works for a living/has some shred of morality, you are nothing more than a petty thief.

I_Hate_This_Place

Piracy is a fact of life for PC developers, and its not surprising that another developer is going the console route.

But this is a problem that EA can mitigate. I don't think they want to pay for Steam and give Valve even more of the market, but they should invest in EA Downloader and make it a top class client.

Encrypted data means no more zero day piracy. A desktop presence means that the easiest way to get a game, is to buy it and download it. It also means customers can access their games from any machine, this is a big bonus, and makes paying for games even more attractive.

hahnchen

Huge exageration. The thing that applies to music applies to games as well: every copy pirated is NOT a lost sale.

and 15-20 people pirate it for every person who's bought it? lol, yeah right. First it was 20. Now its 15-20. Someone doesn't ahve their facts straight

wicko

@2NinjasTapedTogether: You have it backwards, my friend. He's saying that if Crytek sell 66,000 or so copies of Crysis, pirates will have stolen 1,000,000 copies of the game.

wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!

I guess Crytek should go PS3 exclusive if they don't want pirates, pirating there games than because right now its the only platform that you can't burn games for.... (Yet)

I got Crysis for free with my video card... And I'm glad i didn't buy it besides being a very pretty game, the game itself wasn't anything special.

evlyti

@tomsamson: yeah, I will agree that consoles are crippling the visual evolution of things, if pc would become a more popular platform for profit it would help a lot. you know, honestly DRM is progressing very quickly, and the "DRM? I wont buy that shit..." kids probably never planned on buying it in the first place. I don't understand the huge issue with developers not choosing tough DRMs, as a consumer I certainly dont mind connecting to the internet once a week...

chorx

Even if crysis was a totally sucky game (again, i didn´t have much interest in it and therefore haven´t played it much besides at the games convention last year, so i can´t comment on the gameplay a lot really), even just the side that its ne of the last few games totally pushing the tech envelope on the pc makes it important. As i said above, if no company is left who does that then it doesn´t look good for the gaming hardware evolution.

tomsamson

15 pirated copies to 1 sold? Oww. That's pretty sad. And what gets me are folks say that folks pirate it because 90 percent of the time, its the same as something else, which makes no sense to me at all. Of all the console games out there, how many are 'truly' unique. You got platforming, you got FPSs, third person shooters, sports games, uh... and arcade games. You don't see those being pirated hand over fist though.

And that's why I can understand Crytek's CEO saying F'U' to PC gaming. If Ford sold 1 car for ever 15 that were stolen off the lot, I'd be pretty pissed off too, and looking to put armed security guards around them cars, because obviously folks want them, to an extent that they're willing to steal.

In conclusion, good going PC Game Pirates. You're killing off the very companies who give you stuff. While you're at it, why don't you go strangle the goose that laid the golden egg?

Salen

@noodles90: come on, who makes steam? what´s the main sense of steam? selling games and checking licenses? D´ah! Think before you post.

tomsamson

wow what silly excuses yall are using in reply to what they are saying. Calling Crysis just a graphics powerhouse? Im not a pc gamer but i played Crysis at my brothers house, its a fun game as well as looking at the graphics. Yall making every little excuse you can to discredit what are obvious facts to anyone with half a brain.

nip

@chorx: yeah, some console games that come out on pc later have better graphics and/or more gameplay features then, sometimes its also the other way round though, bad quick ports which run sucky and consume way more system ressources than they should.
As developer to me its just sad that the pc is no viable option anymore for certain types of games or selling methods.
As game and tech enthusiast (ok, nerd) that´s sad to me because pc games used to be the high end tech pushers. If the last few developers who pushed the tech envolope on pc move to consoles that could slow down the technical evolution in gaming quite a bit, mostly on hardware side.

tomsamson

looks like a great case of "your doing it wrong"

salaminizer

Wow, so only games with fun multiplayer are purchased? I guess that means Half life 2, Portal and the Episodes are pirated ALOT

noodles90

@futurebiblehero: I think that the legend around the required specs (which is not true, I can run it on a reasonable computer and it still looks amazing) is the reason it was pirated so much. People don't want to buy a game that they don't know if they can run it, so they pirate it "just to see" and never end up buying it because after they played it, it was not that great. I never played Crysis, only the Demo, but I'm gonna pick up Warhead, just because I don't want to see another PC exclusive developer slip over to multi-platform, and then console only games, like Rockstar.

d3ath_fly

Crytek announced quite a while back that Warhead would be their final PC-exclusive title. So I don't think they're really waiting to see how it pans out before deciding, unless they changed their minds.

I'm not for greater DRM-- that's usually been shown to screw the honest customer more than the pirates anyhow. But I really do believe these companies should be coming down on pirates as hard as they can, absolutely.

PC piracy is an issue-- without a doubt. And to be honest, people like this guy aren't helping things. You're saying it's Crytek's fault for making a sci-fi shooter, because people don't want to pay for those? Well, pumpkin, someone must want those games, because people are stealing them. People don't just steal things for fun-- they pirate the games because THEY WANT THEM. And to those of you, like this other guy here, who argue for piracy because you won't play it that long? Well, Crysis has a demo-- so if all you want is to see how the graphics are on your system, there you go. And no offense, but playing the game for just a couple of hours before you delete it doesn't make piracy right. At all. So, you'd prefer being able to rent PC games? So would a ton of people-- it would be a lot more convenient. Unfortunately, that just isn't something we have available to us-- and the thinking that because this doesn't work the way I think it should, I'm entitled to take it for myself without paying and with no consequences? That's completely ridiculous.

People work hard to develop these things-- and frequently, a good portion of their income is based on performance-- ie, how well the games sell. And if you want the game badly enough to pirate it, you ought to buy it-- because you're taking money out of some person's paycheck. No excuses, and no justification. Stealing is stealing. I don't care if it's just a digital copy-- if something is freeware, or shareware-- awesome. Do with that as you will. Open source? Great, tinker with it. But if you're going to pirate games, you have to man up and be willing to accept the consequences. I've got no pity for any of you.

wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!

@Kajetan: Man, no reason to attack that guy personally :)
Ok, i got it,some people don´t like Crysis, maybe not Crytek either and maybe not even the developers they never met personally. Ok. But how come you bitch so much about these guys and take them as sample for "if they made good games i´d buy em" and then disregard all the other companies who were pc centric in the past and are now console centric?
I´ve been to a gamedeveloper meeting yesterday which was mostly about recruiting youngsters and the common sense in every developer´s presentation when introducing their company and current and future development was that they either already are multi platform or will be in the coming 6 months.
I like games Blizzard and Valve make a lot but to me the reason they make that much money is less that people like their stuff so much more, its just that its more troublesome/less enjoable to go with hacked versions of WoW/Steam games.
Again, i don´t believe in the point that people who now steal games would buy way more if the games were that much better.
Otherwise everyone who steals games wouldn´t steal any games and instead just buy every game that is truely good and then spend their time with those genuinely good games.
Many people just have the view why pay for it if i can get it for free? and also: Hey, something new is available for download, i´ll add that one to the queue, too.

tomsamson

Crytek should just follow through with their threats. I'm sure the success they're so desperate for can be found there; console gamers constantly buy the same generic and mediocre games over and over again. Just don't release anything outside of North America and UK, we don't want to hear you cry about piracy again.

Is million copies sold really that bad these days? And are there REALLY 20 million people that even want to play Crysis?

Leanid

the ratio obviously isn't accurate,

@Raziel Dune:
It is waaaay easier to pirate a pc game and waay more convenient than to console... so it does affect pc gaming alot, not as much as crytek team wants to believe though :P

@people who illegally distribute games:

no mather your cause, u suck I'll rather have my DRM than
have u pirate pc games and screw my gaming platform. :/

foxhound009

@JAcK0R: Pirates aren't inhuman monsters, but just peruse any Torrent site, and yes, you'll find torrents for CoD4, Half-Life 2 and any other really good single player game.

Krondonian

Once again, for those of you who missed it, CRYSIS SOLD 1.5 MILLION COPIES. [www.gamesradar.com]

So by Crytek's 1:15 ratio, at least 22.5 MILLION COPIES OF CRYSIS ARE OUT THERE. Wow!

Crabfeast

@JAcK0R: Why aren´t you actually reading any other comments before posting?
You´re just reiterating what was already discussed way earlier.

tomsamson

@tomsamson:
Other games have also constant updates. And they offer nice comunity features too via web their website. But Steam isn't the point here :)

Yeah, you're right! If Devs/Publishers are not satisfied with the commercial success of their games, they have to find other means of income besides the traditional retail. One alternative might be NOT to use any copy protection at all, because a) it does not work as advertised and b) you can put this mopney in additional testing/balancing/polishing.

Another alternative might be the creation of a game, people WANT to buy, want to possess willingly. You cannot force sales!

Another alternative might be to stop WHINING ALL THE TIME about some un-official copies, when you have no FUCKIN proof, that this has any effect on sales.

Yes, you guessed right ... i am a fan of good devs and good games. Good games i buy and good devs i support. I am NOT a fan of any form of copy protection or DRM and i am certainly not a fan of people like Mr. Yerli from Crytek, who blame the easiest target for all their misery. Mr. Yerli, you Sir, you are a coward!

Kajetan

Why won't anyone call Crytek on their bullshit?

Nobody actually bought Crysis because it was a crap game.

People actually bought Sins of a Solar Empire because it was a good game.

Pirates are not inhuman monsters (not all of them, at any rate). People are willing to support companies that deliver genuine and fair game experiences.

DRM is a wild goose chase. It just makes life hell for those who bought the game and the pirate community always finds its own solutions, given enough time.

JAcK0R

oh, and to using a demo as a means to gauge the game - most demo's (at least pc related) are really worthless.

especially if you look at Crysis...or even as far back as BF2 (although i do have to say from a pure demo action perspective - it was great to get me interested because it contained so much gameplay) but the problem and why they're useless is because they are abandoned once they're released (yes thats a demo for you) but in a lot of cases they're terribly put together.

what do you do when you have a demo, that performs like absolute shit but the gameplay is fun? (see BF2 demo - horribly choppy on hardware in it's day) the full version of the game is fine, because it gets patched, but all your left with is a bad taste from the demo.

i'm sorry, but all this bickering about piracy and pc gaming dying because of it is really not going to help anyone or anything. until the developers can come up with a means to deliver content (IE - Steam) they're going to have to deal with piracy on the pc platform (it's a wide open platform, and if you go in thinking that you can be better prepared)

it's funny because until something like Steam, there wasn't a central location everyone could look to. In this day and age, why do we need to ship copies of games to places....if you have a high speed connection you should have a proper means for distribution and thats really what Steam has going for it. They don't have to worry about where you're located, as long as you can download 6+gigs....they'll take your money!

drlard

href="#c6431857">tomsamson: Exactly, its pretty pathetic of people to even have to go their. You go to just about any torrent sites and see the number of download games its pretty bad. So whatever or however Crytek got their numbers dont really matter to me cuz i know the numbers are pretty damn how. Its really funny looking at people constantly trying to spin this.

nip

I tried to buy Crysis yesterday but two Gamestops didn't have it and both had fewer PC games than Target..... maybe thats the problem?

Super_Moose

From what i can tell sadly its unrealistically optimistic to say just make a good game and that will give people the reason to buy it instead of pirating it.
In reality it will maybe make a bigger crowd buy it but pirating on pc is just so easy and common that still most people who are able to pirate would do it no matter what if its about a game type that barely interests them.
I know various people who pirate pretty much anything that becomes available and they only buy something if the downloaded version is severly crippled (such as not being able to play online with others).

tomsamson

@Leepox: In other words, make a game have replay value.

Honestly, as long as smart companies can make profits from PC games, PC games will continue to exist.

Stupid companies deserve to lose money, be broken, and go out of business. That is the law of samur- err, free enterprise.

arstal

to all those who moan about the numbers or where they are taken from
First of all it doesn´t matter that much how high the numbers are exactly, just the side they aren´t low for sure is enough to make developers worried obviously. Next up i heard on a 1up podcast that they talked with people from EA who said they got the numbers by checking popular torrent trackers to see how many concurrent downloads were going on in a certain period of time.

tomsamson

People keep on saying "make a good game and then it wont get pirated and people will buy them"

Are you completely out of your mind???

Pirates will pirate anything, be it a good game or a bad game. Game developers are trying to make a cure i.e. DRM's (which we all hate) when the problem really doesnt lie with their games (if you wanna try it you have to pay for it, they wasted shizloads of their time to make a product and you dont even say thank you) but rather the problem are the pirates. Not that im targetting pirates (cuz back then i had a few pirated stuff going on lol) and most of em say buy the game if you like it =D

The real task is creating a game that will be good enough so that potential consumers will be compelled to buy it (be it for multiplayer, company loyalty, collectors, proudness of owning one, etc etc). And i think that is the soltion, the obstacle, and what every developer should have in mind nowadays.

Leepox

@Kajetan: yeah, but with steam you usually get some more reasons for buying a game like the constant updates or all the nice community/mp gaming features.
and yup, steam was just a suggestion, as said they could also try other ways like advertising driven content, micro transactions, doing more casual games or just no fps anymore or going to consoles as first release platform.

tomsamson

Not again. I would like Yerli to explain how he knows how many copies of his game have been pirated, does the software phone home? That's a bit shit for starters.

Furthermore, I'd like Yerli to prove how he knows those pirated copies would be actual sales if the pirated version wasn't available. If something is free, people will download it just for the hell of it, but that doesn't mean they would pay for it if that was the only option!

I think the guy is desperately trying to justify Crysis not selling very well by blaming piracy. I would blame the uninspiring gameplay and the crippling system requirements. I would imagine the real reason Warhead runs a lot smoother than Crysis is because the team has realised selling games that work best with a quad core CPU and the latest card from Nvidia or ATI significantly restricts your audience. And before anyone points out that it runs fine on their mid-range PC, yes I'm sure it does run, but I bet you're not running at the highest settings that were used for all the screenshots and trailers they made. Anything less that the highest settings and the game just looks like a slightly prettier Far Cry with the same uninvolving gameplay.

photoboy

@Kajetan: Yes, but giving gamers a legitimate purchasing system which is as instantaneous as the torrent networks will mitigate some of the affects of casual piracy.

hahnchen

@nip:
You mean "facts" that they just pulled out of thin air? I'm sure piracy is serious but they didn't exactly explain how they got those numbers.

@Salen:
Again we don't know where they go those numbers, in another site that I read people actually paid attention and asked where they got the numbers. Sounds like the guy was just guessing. About why consoles don't get as much piracy, the hardware has to be hacked as mentioned, which is way harder than PC piracy. Again, I'm sure piracy is probably pretty bad so far, but is it really to the point that some of these people are making it out to be? Who knows. And again, who knows how many of those are actual lost sales? If you count them up, probably a lot of those people were not going to buy the game anyways. Doesn't make piracy right, it's still wrong, but that's still a valid question.

I don't see the prediction that everyone (seems like it's always the same people though) is making of PC games "dying" as true. Worst comes to worst, there it will all be ports, as Crytek is implying. Some PC exclusive games are doing absolutely fine though.

On the Crysis issue, for the people talking about piracy to try the game out, there IS a demo, though it's possible these people weren't aware of it (or didn't bother to look). Not in terms of piracy, Crytek might have scared off people who might have had some interest in the game but feared their computer can't run it. That just might not be a very good marketing strategy, piracy or no piracy ("wow our game is so good your computer can't possibly run it!"). That's another issue on PC games, that there is the continual push to upgrade the system to play new games. That might be a bigger factor in the move of actual sales to consoles than piracy (rather than the imagined "lost" sales to piracy).

stopcrazypp

I love it when they assume that everyone who pirates their game would buy the original. sure some would but a very small percentage.

IroKuMata

I've never quite understood how games developers can translate a pirate copy into a potential sale.

If there was no such thing as piracy, and everyone HAD to buy it, then their sales wouldn't be as high as their piracy rate at now. That's just a simple fact.

For a games developer to turn around and quote this, really just makes me think they are trying to save face for something else. Or just trying to play down their originally estimated sales targets that they have not met.

Crysis was a pretty good game overall, i enjoyed it but i waited until it was £15 in my local GAME. And that was only because i was in a gaming drought at the time.

Disdain

@tomsamson:

"They could also sell their games on steam first and exclusively in the future with constant online validation, but yeah, dunno if their publishers would like that."

You might want to know, that Steam exclusive games are available via P2P on the day, they are released on Steam. Steam as copy protections fails miserably.

Kajetan

Maybe they could/should make a game that's more interesting than clipping your toenails.

heretrix

@Krondonian: That will be misconstrued- hit enter accidentally.

I got the Tamriel Rebuilt mod for my standard copy of the game, but it required the 2 expansions. As I couldn't buy the expansions in any shop, I torrented it.

I have the full GOTY edition for Xbox too, so I didn't feel too guilty about nicking the expansions.

The thing I discovered was that it was easy as fuck to illegally obtain an entire game, for free.

If you think by making a great game you'll somehow become immune from piracy you're deluded. Please stop with the whining that it's Crytek's fault.

The only problem is the pirates. The people who spent years making the game-- that's their job. So don't bother making excuses as to why they're losing out, when you come here to read about the hard work people like them do. Please.

Krondonian

first, i would like to see where they got their numbers...because "90% of all statistics can be made to say anything… 50% of the time" or "60% of the time, it works EVERY time" - yeah sex panther!

i can pull numbers out of my ass to make myself sound awesome, but how can you realistically gauge piracy?

how did the original xbox software sales fair? anyone ever try to mod one of them? ridiculously easy. and not just the mod, but to install a whole new OS on the thing and turn it into a.....media center pc that plays games too!

i don't really have a central point for all this but a few things to consider:

most consoles (with the exception of any made by nintendo it seems...) are computers. computers that the software developers know is in a locked down environment. (until the hardware is hacked)

why would a developer concentrate on any single platform? i'm sorry crytek, but if you're going to whine that you only sold 1.5 million copies of a game (that was APPARENTLY pirated a gazillion times) that can run as good as you're trying to sell it to look, you damn well better be releasing it to as many different platforms as you can - or make it something that can run on anyone's pc and still look decent.

valve, blizzard...these guys have been around for ages, developers, LEAN ON THESE GUYS FOR INFO....good god why would you not want to follow in their footsteps? these guys survived the "piracy terrorist wars" and they're still shinning!

and lastly, if a company doesn't make good games (or media) in this day and age, they damn well better be able to swallow the consequence pill...because i for one am a very picky gamer, and i do not make enough money to buy something that i probably won't like - and have no avenue to get that money back. if i download crysis, play it for a few mins and go "wtf is this?" i can delete it and i'm out nothing....if i download crysis, and really like it, i would buy it....unfortunately i think crysis is a very bad game and would never spend any money on it, and wouldn't even take a free copy.

/off high horse

drlard

@I_Hate_This_Place: Fuck this. I really hate it when someone gets on the piracy is stealing preachy bus.

It's not stealing. It's copyright infringement. Two totally different concepts which are handled by two different bodies of law; criminal law, and tort law.

If you steal from Wal-mart, Wal-mart no longer have that item to sell.

hahnchen

I have pirated one game.

It was Morrowind, GOTY edition. I downloaded a mod for Morrowind (

Krondonian

@mva5580: The 360 is pretty easy to pirate on and you get to play multiplayer without buying the game which isn't possible on the PC.

Bootes

I've always wondered why PC developers don't integrate several different copy protection schemes in a timed manner. Successively layering different protection schemes as the game progresses would slow down the crackers, allowing the game in question to take advantage of that oh-so-important first month. As long as some sort of public notice is served by the developer (i.e. crackz will cause random and inexplicable bugs and crashes), a Titan Quest-type debacle could be avoided.

Or bloody hell, integrate the copy protection scheme as part of the game itself, dependent on well-produced tchochkes that are included with the game package--old school style. It adds value to the overall product and it might slow down piracy. I've always thought most PC piracy happens because it's just so goddamn easy; however, I don't think a lot of people would go to the trouble of printing out a 120-page color coded manual, map and code wheel. The costs alone would probably be only slightly less than the actual retail price of the game (ink is bloody expensive, after all). True, they could alt-tab between a pdf reader and the game, but that shit's just inconvenient, especially when so many games have issues with alt-tabbing.

I think that's key: instead of engaging the crackers in some sort of executable arms race, just make the pirated product inconvenient to use. Thoughts?

JustThisGuy

make it steam exclusive, but even steam can be pirated ... i hate that

because i really really like steam

waza

I always knew piracy was killing the PC industry, but I never thought it was THAT bad. Good Lord. No wonder more and more developers aren't making PC exclusives anymore.

ttocs

@Leanid: I don't really understand your sarcasm. A million units sold is a great accomplishment-- but when you know many, many more people have stolen your work, why wouldn't you want to realise that revenue stream? That's not desperate-- that's just sensible.

wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!

The sense of entitlement some people have is unbelievable. You do not have a right to be entertained. The entertainment industry doesn't run on fucking donations. Whether or not you enjoyed the product is wholly irrelevant to whether you ought to pay for it.

Piracy is particularly inexcusable for games that have demos. If you pirate a game that has a demo then you are simply the scum of the earth.

Toasticus

@Leanid:
"And are there REALLY 20 million people that even want to play Crysis?"

no, but probably that many downloaded it just because it was there.

"oh, did you know there is a game..."
"I could download that"

some days later...

"uhh what's this doing here wasting space?" *delete*

infi

@masterdingo: But there are arrangements between the publisher and the rental frachise. Those copies of the game were purchased fairly, and they've certainly got the (probably grudging) blessing of the publisher to rent them out. I'm sure the publisher doesn't care for it, but they received something for their trouble. Publishers also hate the used game business-- but they accept it, because right now they need places like GameStop to push their business. I'm sure if they can find a way to cut the used business out entirely, they will do so.

But these things ARE NOT THE SAME as piracy-- absolutely not. When you pirate a game, you are giving nothing to the publisher for what you've taken. It might seem like a small difference, the amount of money the publisher makes between one copy sold to Blockbuster and then rented out, and the absolutely nothing you'd be giving for a piece of pirate PC software, but it's not. It's the crux of the entire issue. Piracy is stealing. It is theft. Renting, for better or for worse, is the end step in an accepted business strategy.

wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!

@desterion:
Ridiculous! Who doesn't want to pay $60 for a game that has barely 6 hours of single player gameplay and can barely run on your pc?

Guys?

GreyFoxV1

seems like what pc game companies are pretty much damned if they do, damned if they don't. On one hand they could just all move to a system in which the user needs an internet connection to authenticate the game. on the other hand that really fucks things up for anyone either A) without the internet, or B) who want to play games on say a laptop in an area without the internet.

so yeah either way they're kinda boned :/

demonknightinuyasha

It could also be the fact that Crysis isn't that good of a game, and no amount of whining by Crytek is going to fix that.

desterion

1 sale: 15 people who weren't going to buy the game anyway.

GreyFoxV1

@JustThisGuy: I think you should actually have to call in to the developer's workplace, and answer three questions, Monty Python and the Holy Grail-style.

What is your name?

What is your quest?

What is the fourteen-digit receipt identification number from the place where you legally purchased this copy of Hellgate London?

wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!

@wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!: It's not sensible, it's wishful thinking. Publishers honestly believe that a pirated game would have been a sold game had it not been pirated. They are completely wrong about that. If I pirated a game, I would be far more likely to purchase it than if I had not. I just posted a very long comment explaining why this is so, and if it posts you can see why I believe this.

masterdingo

How the hell does he come up with a crazy ass ratio like that? Goddamned simpleton, blaming a game's slim financial success on pirates instead of blaming the development team and their unexplainable urge to push graphics to the cutting edge of current technology. Seriously, who has enough money for a top notch gaming pc AND the time to even play games? Games should always offer very reasonable system requirements. People don't own monstrosities, for the most part. And don't they want to sell their games to as many people as possible?

Plus, using development tools that are a few years old can only reduce development costs.

Really, that guy is an idiot that needs to get his head out of his buttocks and stop blaming pirates for all of his problems.

tabion20

This wouldn't happen on the 360 as much.
This wouldn't happen at all on the PS3.

hm.

stargateheaven

Let me start off by saying that I neither bought, nor pirated Crysis. I just wasn't interested in the game. The game engine looks nice, but the game itself looks as mediocre as a wilted salad.

As for console games, I tend to rent everything from Gamefly. I've bought one game for my 360, and that was GTAIV. I'll probably buy Soul Calibur IV as well since it's a game that I will play on and off for years. That being said, I play roughly 6-8 games a month on my 360.

According to those of you claiming that pirating games = thieving / stealing, that means that I'm stealing by renting games for the 360. Per your argument:
"People work hard to develop these things-- and frequently, a good portion of their income is based on performance-- ie, how well the games sell. And if you want the game badly enough to pirate it, you ought to buy it-- because you're taking money out of some person's paycheck. No excuses, and no justification. Stealing is stealing."

Since I rent games for the 360, I am effectively taking money out of the Publishers' pockets (as the Devs have already been paid by the time of the games release, though some bonuses for high sales may still be in their hopes for the future) as they only make money on the sale of a few copies to Gamefly. Thousands of people will play those few copies, but only in it's digital form. Those people will not own any of the marketing material, the disc, or the box that the game comes in. So, in essence, since I am experiencing the game, in it's entirety, by renting it, your definition of theft would include me.

I used to download games for the PC, some of which I would later buy because they were good and deserved my money. The last game I bought for the PC was WoW, over 4 years ago. I haven't pirated any games from the PC in that time, either. If I had, I would have been far more likely to buy a game that I liked. I see no theft in piracy, I see an alternate marketing path that the game companies do not approve of. Much like the marketing theory that if you paper flier a neighborhood then roughly 1 out of 100 people will come to purchase the product advertised, piracy is helping the PC market. I no longer download games, so I no longer buy games. If Crytek wants to jump to consoles, then they're going to have to ask gamefly for roughly .02 cents of my dollar.

There's a whole other side to this on the retail front. Let's say that I do enjoy buying video games from a retailer. If I buy a console game, I can usually return that game for any other game in the store for equal or lesser value. But, if I do the same thing with a PC game, I will have to take the exact same game if the store allows for the return at all. The reason for this is DRM. They can only sell that game to me as it only has 3-5 more installs left on it, and the key is assigned to me, so if they resell that game, the Publisher red flags that game. Once again, game piracy alleviates this problem. If someone pirates a game in passing (and don't bring up the demo argument, as the demo isn't the true game more often than not. Features are added and removed depending on the time in the game dev cycle that the demo was released, especially considering bugs that are there in the full version and not in the demo or vice versa.) and finds that they like a game a lot, and it runs well on their system, they are more likely to buy it, or, even better, tell a bunch of their friends about how awesome the game is so that they go out and buy it. So, if one pirate (-$60) likes a game enough to tell 5 friends how awesome the game is (+$300) then the Publisher should be happy with the outcome (+$240). But, if their game is mediocre or less, the pirate deletes said game from their hard drive and the friends never hear about it, which means that the publisher just lost that $240 without ever knowing it happened except for the record of the one illegal download. If your games are good, and priced right ($15 - $30), they will sell. People will stream without intent to buy, and that is not a loss, it's a potential gain... because, if it's good, you just paid for advertising for the assumed price of your game (though, there were no marketing materials taken, no discs taken, and no box taken, so you didn't really lose anything, did you?). I have no sympathy for developers that make mediocre games and then expect the market to bear the weight of their nonsensical projected sales data and then blame something that might actually have been a boon to their sales had they made a truly great game.

masterdingo

@JustThisGuy: "I don't think a lot of people would go to the trouble of printing out a 120-page color coded manual, map and code wheel."

Then the crackers will just release a list of the codewords, or dissect the formula behind the code wheel. Really, it's not fundamentally different than coming up with a CD Key generator. I don't think there's much you can do to deter the people that do this stuff until there's a media / hardware-based solution that somehow locks them out (like the PS3 seems to be doing fairly well with so far).

It's ultimately futile. The more companies go to lengths to lock this stuff out, the more they hassle legitimate consumers like myself.

futurebiblehero

@Bootes: The 360 is not easy in the grand scheme of things considering what you have to buy and how you have to do it. A lot of people just dont feel like going threw it enough to even be bothered with it. With PC, its right their in your face and you practically dont have to do anything but download really. Add this and to the fact that MS is constantly figuring out ways to catch hackers with using new tools all the time. In the end, it will never be as easy as PC gamers have it.

nip

@Bootes: um its very much possible on the pc

kommanderk

I do find it slightly funny that people say what they do about the anti-piracy measures, saying they're no good and all that, and then when a company does something drastic about it (like that whole PC Mass Effect thing) there's a huge uproar in the community about it... and although I may not necessarily agree with their method, it really is their right to, as it's their product

and on another note I finally have a computer that will run crysis. I think I might pick it up.

kathartik

@Covert_Knight: Those are some sensible suggestions there. A couple of issues though:

1) I don't know where you buy games, but in my local stores console games sell for £40, when PC equivalents are usually £30.

Furthermore, PC games rapidly depreciate in value- far more so than console games. I can pick up Company of Heroes with Dawn of War in a 2 for £8 offer. That's crazy cheap.

2) The endlessness thing is already happening- mods. I have the Tamriel Rebuilt mod for Morrowind and in that the modders are basically recreating the entire continent-- far beyond the original (and already massive) game.

Quake and Half-Life are still getting modded along with thousands of others, with new map packs coming out all the time. Battlefield 2 is getting a new one soon, if I remember.

3) Despite all of these, people still pirate because they can play the game for free, then move on and play the next game for free. They get that updated content-- it's not little tidbits, but entirely new games.

Krondonian

Look at games like Spore, or even the upcoming Diablo 3. They have simplistic character models and textures, and so, they can run on any PC. The reason Crysis didn't sell so well, was because a top-of-the-range PC isn't something that easy to have, and it's ultimately something that won't turn out to be necessary just for a single game.

Ashurahori

@wild homes is weathering cephalopod trouble!: I fully endorse this 100%. In fact, I will go so far as to say that all PC games should now include special chairs--tied into a master control system overseen by an ominously-cloaked Gabe Newell--that will forcefully eject you straight out the nearest window if a question is answered incorrectly.

We need to get some VC funding for this, STAT!

JustThisGuy

There are a few things, I think the singleplayer developers of the PC industry can do, however I doubt that they'll be scrolling through the 100+ comments while glancing at an article on kotaku, but here it goes anyway.

(WARNING: This is going to be TL:DR for most of you)

1.) Release games on Steam that need some encoding to need Steam. This is an obvious idea, but forcing players to need an internet connection isn't the worstt idea, but of course it isn't the best either. However, most of us will have internet connection wherever we are. And that's something I'm willing to do.

2.) Give incentives for people wanting the legal copy, basically, add little bits of content here and there that require an update/patch which of course will check if they have a real copy. A new patch with a new map and new gun every 3 months or something. Not a lot just a reason for us not wanting to hassle finding some activator. Also plenty of players appreciate developers who show support to gamers. Or hell you can just do it the EA way and finish the game, remove content and then add it back slowly.

3.) Remove things like SecuRom, they are incentives to PIRATE. Hell I DID pirate Bioshock even though I BOUGHT IT. That's how annoying the "real" version was. Something that is so annoying, that even though I attained it legally I pirated a copy because it was giving me issues.

4.) Money money money. I know you want to charge more for your games, but releasing a game for $40 is probably the sweet spot. Honestly who wants to pay for a console version of the same game if it's $20 more?

5.) Combo your games more often with hardware sellers. If EVGA is selling a new nvidia graphics card with a new game I really want bundled, why should I get the XFX version if they're nearly identical. Ok so EVGA isn't going to pay you full price but that is copies that you might not have gotten.

6.) Kind of like what I said from #2, but what if for example, you made a never ending game? Say it's a superhero game, like batman. It's an awesome open world games with lots of bad guys, but there are no endings. Instead you keep adding patches and support as if it was an MMO, which you charge a very small fee ($5 per release or something) and you add more storylines and content for things to happen. So the player has beaten Mr. Freeze, ok well add content to have the Riddler, or add a new mission where Freeze escapes, well you get the idea.

Anyway that's all the ideas I can come up with. People work on incentives, it's all a means of figuring out how to make them decide that paying is more worth it.

Covert_Knight

Wait, so according to Crytek, they should of sold over 30 million copies of the game...you know, since piracy is 20-1 and they're giving off the impression that everyone who downloaded it should of bought it instead.

Keep dreaming Crytek.

Darkest Daze

@masterdingo: How is it fair to hold game developers up to some standard along the lines of "don't even bother unless you're making a truly great game"? Capitalism doesn't run off some imaginary right the consumer has to satisfaction. Yes, the goal is consumer satisfaction, but it's not a mandate! And guess what, there's a way to vote with your wallet without even engaging in piracy: not paying for the game AND not playing it.

Your dismissal of demos is also hogwash. Yes, sometimes the actual game is significantly different from the demo -- sometimes better, sometimes worse -- but you DO NOT have a right to know whether the full game is like the demo. You DO have a right to purchase the full game and find out for yourself, or hey, call me crazy, you could check out some game reviews and see if other people think the demo represents the full game well. Again, you cannot operate on some imaginary princible whereby the consumer has a right to know about every single game they could possibly enjoy.

Another note: devs don't just make one game and call it quits. The sales of their previous games determine the funding of future projects. One doesn't just hurt publishers when one pirates.

And lastly, renting is extremely different from piracy. Copies of games for rentals don't just