News CryTek no longer PC exclusive

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/30/crytek-no-longer-pc-exclusive/1

CryTek has officially surrendered to the pressure of consoles, citing piracy as the main reason it'll no longer be PC exclusive.

 

Did no one tell them that it could well be their own fault for hiring a rock to write the story for the game?

I'm not sure many people want to pay for something to beat the hell out of their machine while they experience what can only be described as every shooter for the last decade rolled together, badly..

 

all of a sudden, the anti piracy gear behind bioshock seems almost reasonable. we've suffered big time because of piracy.

or

look at it the other way and crysis are just money hungry greedy pigs

 

Did bioshock honestly see less piracy? I didn't pirate it but then i didn't buy it either, same goes for crysis.

Hands up who sick of hearing the piracy scape goat for mediocre games....

 

I bought Crysis, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. I'm suprised that they haven't made it available on Steam yet - but then the publisher is EA, so what do you expect.

 

How much piracy has TF2 seen or HL2? I'm curious since i've never gone looking and i'm at work so most of "that" kind of information gets blocked.

 

Maybe part of the problem is the expense of PC hardware. You spend so much money on all the components to be able to play games like Crysis that the user feels as though they shouldn't have to pay for the actual games. I for one know of people who spend so much money on their PC primarily because of the ease of piracy. It's a trade off of sorts.

 

i dont think its the UK market that is causing massive amounts of piracy...

If you want to play a game buy it, if you dont like it trade it in. If you have got the money to run a high end machine then you have got the money to buy the games.

In the past i use to buy a game and then copy it so i could have multiplayer on my home network, but that was it, i classified it as 'backup copies', i still think you can backup up a DVD or app if it remains in your ownership, if you have a few 1000 copies then i would see it as a little dodgy...

 

Piracy is just an excuse. The real motivating factor for consolization is market size. There are fundamentally three platforms out there for high end games (PC PS3 and 360) and why would you limit yourself to one when you can sell to all 3? A crappy game selling on three platforms is going to make more money than a great game selling on one.

 

Developers have got to make a convincing case for buying games. If people can get something for free why should they pay for it? In my opinion, the best way of doing this is selling your game on Steam. I've bought several games from there because it can be really cheap and it's really convenient. I'm sure that if every A-list title was on Steam, we wouldn't experience the piracy problems that we do.

 

I hope and wish that the PC Alliance brings out a nice interface program that enhances the PC Gaming experience. It should be more like live perhaps even linking up with live seen as both platforms are Microsoft owned... but then again I'm dreaming.

On the Piracy matter, It's hurting alot of companies... the PC gaming community is more and more becoming a PC pirate bay. There is no good reason for you to steal (and believe it or not it is stealing money) from these companies, yes they are in there for money.... THEY ARE COMPANIES!!!

Anyway I find it Uber n00by for people to download games because they don't have enough motivation to ether go to your local gaming store or bloody pick up a credit card and punch the numbers in folks How hard is that?

 

Why they never ask people why they didn't buy their game? Perhaps gamers with slow PC's don't want to spend 100$ for a game which will look like 98's game on their machine(and play even worse). Perhaps some gamers don't like invasive copy protection(my case). Perhaps they should try offering better prices...

I would buy Crysis if there were no internet activation stupidity(same for Bioshock) and if it were slightly cheaper.

Just saying "we're leaving PC's" isn't going to solve anything. If they leave PC's, pirates will leave too...

 

It's name is steam. It stops zero day piracy. it is great. Release your games through it and rejoice!

 

The same company wasn't last year who was saying that Crysis will be Vista exclusive ONLY? Forcing people to buy the expensive 8800GTS640 and 8800GTX looking into the future for a fantastic game?
What happened is that they deliver a small game who none is going to buy ( at least in UK) for £40 ($80).
I didn't got it and I had the machine (which I sold to a friend) that period.

On the other side there are PC games that worth more fun and value than Crysis (and cheaper!!!).
Examples? Civilization 4 (including all the expansion packs) is a huge game. A game is never same than another one. It's plays perfectly on my low budget X2 6400+ (780G motherboard) machine, on the 1080p 50" plasma tv with full gfx. It play even on my laptop (Sempron 3000, X1100 gfx) when traveling. Also Oblivion, X3, are few of the games around there where you can carry on after years playing. And this September we have Spore. That will be a good value for money and fun game which I will buy twice because my wife want to play it too.

In the mean time MS force me to learn their Robotics Studio to program AI for their robotic challenges.

 

WORD

 

The (sad) truth

 

I think games like Sins of a solar empire are increasingly becoming the way to go, and the sales of that game have been excellent. No copy protection, but access to patches is login (cdkey) based. The graphics are scabale from very very basic all the way up to face slackeningly beautiful, and the gameplay is immersive, addictive and endlessly replayable.

Crysis invited this on itself, with system requirements so high people were unwilling to buy the game for fear it wouldn't work, and a single player narative with absolutly no replay value.

 

They may lose some sales due to piracy, but as ever, one has to ask many of those 25,000 people would have actually gone to drop £30 on Assassin's Creed if they couldn't have got it for free from the internet, I'm thinking it wouldn't have been that many. It's likely as well that a lot of those people play for a couple of hours or so, decide they don't like it, and move on - effectively using it as a demo when one isn't provided.

Personally, I think invasive anti-piracy measures may hurt sales more than piracy itself. I for one (and I'm surely not alone here) didn't, and will never, buy BioShock (even though I would actually like to - and indeed almost did before reading up on it) because of the ludicrously draconian anti-piracy they packaged with that.

Developers/Publishers should take a leaf out of Stardock's book, who ship their games with no piracy protection whatsoever - as they point out 'People who never buy software aren't lost sales' - if you make a good game, then it will sell lots, it's as simple as that.

ps - neither do I think Steam is the answer here, they are still putting restrictions on a product you have bought off them! i.e. your own property! I like having my games available on disc/offline as well and if I am shelling out my hard-earned for a game then I should be able to have a hard-copy of it if I so choose. Again - Stardock allow you to pay for the download, or for a slight fee get a disc sent out out too (minus copy protection). Three cheers for Stardock! If only all developers were like them...

 

Lets see.

I've not bought crysis. I've not pirated crysis either because I don't do that anymore (It's nice being legit, you should all try it ) . Back when I was downloading games for a bit, It probably would have been one I would have because:

It probably wouldn't have run at all well.
I'd heard bad things about the story.
I'd heard multiplayer was probably the bigger focus (not my thing..)
I had some desire to "see" it, but little desire to really "want" it if that makes sense.

It just sounded/sounds like a shallow game trying to be "cool" that only stood out because of a graphics engine with the potential to be really pretty, but really problematic for most people at the same time. In that respect I agree with stardock's take on the matter - a lot of developer's work really hard at being the coolest, with the shiniest graphics and in so doing almost completely miss the market segment that actually buys games because they don't offer what they want (EG high quality gameplay that's going to last that can be run on a wide variety of machines)

 

One thing about steam and HL2/TF2 is that I know I will enjoy any game from valve, they have never let me down. Why would I want to pirate one of their games? Especially with the hassle of getting past steam and wanting to play multiplayer. I think many other gamers feel the same way about certain other companies, but crytek don't quite have that image.

Or do they? I heard that crysis ending up selling quite well, once everyone had managed to get a hold of their 8800GT's. It seems kinda childish to blame piracy for the move to consoles. The console market simply put, is much much bigger. As much as I hate to say it, It doesn't really make much sense for a fps to remain PC exclusive, and I'm suprised they didn't make the move sooner.

As for assasin's creed, they released it with no demo and high system requirements... People "checking" if they could play it probably amounted to a large proportion those downloads.