In the past few months, we have heard from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli rant a number of times against piracy of PC games, specifically for his 2007 shooter Crysis. He has even claimed that just one legitimate copy of the game has been sold compared to 20 pirates copies of the game. But are such numbers misleading? Edge Online has an opinion that says, "Yes",

That opinion comes from Tom Jubert, an editor for the UK based Gameshadow which supplies automatic downloads of PC games. Jubert does state, "There's no doubt that PC gaming suffers due to piracy - and to a considerably greater extent than console titles." However, he believes that Yerli's claims of the amount of piracy is overblown. Jubert uses data from their own Gameshadow program to prove his point, saying, "What that means is I can tell you the ratio of legal vs illegal Crysis installs in GameShadow's UK customer base is more like 7:3, while in the US it's closer to 5:1 - a far less bleak scenario."

And while Yerli's ratio claims may in fact be true in a worldwide sense, Jubert adds, "they are not representative of the true impact of piracy on the PC games industry." He states most pirated copies are going to territories where there's not a large PC gaming market anyway. Also he feels not everyone who pirated a copy of the game would haved purchased it anyway if they couldn't get a free copy anyway. Jubert's conclusion? "In short, rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it's often employed as."