Crytek brings up piracy again for Crysis

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Crytek brings up piracy again for Crysis

Posted Aug 28th 2008 1:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Biz, FPS

Once again we are hearing from a team member from Crytek about how piracy affected sales of their 2007 PC FPS Crysis. Edge Online has a chat with the company's engine business manager Harald Seeley who said that pirates would likely not have bought the game if they were unable to find pirated copies.

Seeley is quoted as saying, "judging by, for example, the number of users who downloaded our patches, there were a lot more active players than there were unit sales. And I think we can safely say if they were still playing the game by the time our latest patch released, and if they were playing on a pirated copy, then they were a sale that didn't happen but probably would have had it not been possible to obtain the game illegally." A couple of months ago, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said that piracy was so bad, the company sold only one legit copy of Crysis for every 20 pirated copies out there. Despite these numbers, Crysis was still a profitable game for the developer.

Tags: crysis, crysis-warhead, crytek

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

i agree. if someone like the game so much that they play it this long then they should give something for it.Posted at 1:37PM on Aug 28th 2008 by a

Hang on, the two paragraphs are mixing me up. Is he or is he not saying that the people who pirated it wouldn't have bought it anyway?

And at his evidence.. I've downloaded each of the patches three times due to hard drive failures and me uninstalling it to save space.Posted at 2:56PM on Aug 28th 2008 by Haggard

i think it's horrible because when things like this happen they seriously contemplate making another one. thank god they have already decided to keep going but at this rate people keep pirated quality games all we will have left are the crappy casual ones that cost nothing to make compared to a game like crysis.Posted at 3:48PM on Aug 28th 2008 by Anthony Porter

They really need to stop their complaining. It's making them look bad. For a game to be pirated that much (and it was, I followed many trackers' numbers myself) and to have cost as much as it must have to develop and publish, and to still be profitable, they don't have much to gripe about.

We know piracy is an issue, but you just look stupid complaining about it when your game succeeded despite it. That's not a great place to be in when you're arguing that piracy is severely affecting sales.Posted at 6:50PM on Aug 28th 2008 by Sokkratez

I'm going to level with him:
I know people who pirate games. Hell, I used to do it.
However, when I used to pirate games, I paid for anything I found that was quality. My friends who pirated games back in the '90s did the same.

While I know not enough people have this mentality, they should. If all pirates had that mentality, then that would urge developers to make good games. Bad games don't make money; only good games do.

Wasn't there a business model that allowed you to download the full version of videogames and play them for say...three hours before deciding whether or not to pay for the entire thing (or pay for time to play it, eventually after a certain amt. spent, the game is yours)? If there isn't, then damnit, shouldn't there be?

Think about it. You have the full game on your hard drive. Play it for a few hours. See if you like it. If you do, either pay for more time or buy the damn thing. Forget demos; demos are nice, but they don't allow revenue. In fact, if anything, they decrease revenue by letting people know that you have a terrible game (See: Haze). Posted at 3:12AM on Aug 30th 2008 by hesham8