Crytek To Ditch PC Exclusives

Crytek are to abandon PC only releases in future, and the reason (of course) is piracy. Apparently Crysis was pirated by so many people that it caused them a huge loss.

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/7962-crytek-moves-away-from-pc-exclusive-game-development-thanks-to-piracy/

Right, so it's nothing to do with Crysis being rubbish and aimed at such a small number of people with insanely high tech hardware who only want to run it as a tech demo to show off to friends then. It's not the derivative and dull gameplay. No, it's piracy.

I love this quote



Yeah, I think the word you're looking for is "better", not similar.

I expect they'll move to PS3 mainly. I mean the PS3 has that thing where you can link multiple PS3's up to get more power, so they can target people who own 5 PS3's and have them linked up to get enough juice to run it.

There was nothing really wrong with Crysis the game, it was certainly better than most but their timing to release it was poor and having a high-spec as part of their release hype was dumb. I think most PC only games are going to suffer from a declining number of PC only gamers, particularly at the high end.

Trying to blame it on piracy is plain stupid though, I don't know anyone who pirated Crysis. Even the people I know that pirate everything (there are people like that) didn't pirate Crysis. I do know a lot of people who didn't buy it because they felt their system wouldn't be able to play it or that it was just another flashy FPS.

In the long run it's a sensible decision for anyone making AAA titles to not just target the PC. All the innovation is being done on the consoles, the hardware platform is stable and the cost of entry and maintenance is so much lower. Particularly with a world economy that's slowing down its plain foolhardy to pin all your hopes on a small number of PC enthusaists.

Sony have taken the long view with titles like GTA 4 and it's paying off for them. ~ 55% - 60% of GTA 4 sales where Xbox 360, without those sales it wouldn't be the success it is.

Darkheart

I'm sure piracy did hurt their sales - but then you could argue the same for Bioshock.

Fact is if they'd been a bit more creative rather than plonking for the usual special ops heros vs aliens which we've seen a thousand times in both movies and games (Predator anyone?), people might have been a bit more interested after the initial hype.

So for me I felt no real interest in knowing how the story played out. Instead I dabbled around in the demo and reminded myself I've played Far Cry already and called it a day. If they'd grabbed me with the story, I probably would've overlooked the mediocre performance and shelled out.

(Also, given the global political environment, perhaps people are getting just a bit fed up with the usual assumption that american soldier automatically means superhero?)

perhaps crysis would have been sold better if the game was not a large tech demo for the crytek engine or if it ran on regular systems while looking still good.

Two elemental components they somehow missed ... its not like we are still in 1995 and they compate with blood fest games nor is crytek EA with millions of PR budget to compensate for trash.
They should have thought upfront what kind of market they target -> high end gamer sector and focused on satisfying that instead of their own wishes ... then they would have had and would have the needed community support through mods etc ...
a shooter with no active and quite "large" modding community today has little chance to survive over a longer period and with that, it won't sell well as games today sell over time due to the crazy prices. they won't sell hundred of tousands of copies anymore on weekend 1 and the like, most don't consider a shitty shooter on PC beeing worth console game prices (where the devs have to pay licensing fees to sell it and have to pass the console creators QA etc)

I'll buy exactly 4 games this year at launch. Thats GTA, Smash Brothers Brawl (June), Spore (Sept) and StarCraft 2 (sept at the moment, guess around may 09 for real)

for the rest I'll wait until it drops down to acceptable pc game prices -> 40 USD (games launch here in europe / switzerland at 80-90 USD at the current conversion rate. thats 5 USD below X360 games)

Didn't Epic say something along the same lines a month ago?


And last I checked, Crysis still sold pretty damn good in terms of PC game sales lately while given its insane sys requirements.

They did, and they - purely coincidentally - had a game released in the fourth quarter of last year which had high system requirements, tech demo graphics and derivative gameplay which made most people think they'd already played it in the last outing.

Funny that.

Crytek seems to find always new excuses, first they blamed that they could not finish the game using OpenGL, and moved to DirectX only (this I can understand, since ATI had at that time very bad OpenGL drivers, but nVIDIA was always OK).

Now they claim that piracy ruins their market, although piracy is what raises the sales. In many countries which have as citizens the majority of earth population, for example singapore with mandarin chinese, they sell only pirated games. The pirate shops (around 99% of all shops in singapore), need still to buy the original game to copy it. And I think that the sales which go to pirate shops is about the same as goes to invidual people in other countries, since the number of people is asia is so insanely much higher than anywhere else in the world. You could probably say that 1 shop = 1 people if you compare asia vs the rest of the world.

Alone in Taiwan they have like 6 million people playing an online RPG, EverQuest had like 300k at best. Oh, just noticed that WoW has 10 million subscribers, probably most of them Asian farmers :)

I can sort of understand the decision. You never hear console gamers complaining about story, originality, gameplay, etc...they just pull their wallets out for whatever the TV tells them to buy.

It's too bad they switched from OpenGL, ATI came up with good drivers right after the game was released.

No WoW has no asian farmers at least not anymore, blizzard ip banned the whole are that was not meant for the given game version -> if you are outside of europe you can not play on the europe wow servers even if you own a europe version.

And crytek will find new excuses until they get bought out and their high end programmers get put into real projects not tech demos.
As for UT3: who the hell pays a 4th time for the same stuff + 1 new mode? Only EA Sports morrons do that actually.

Like clockwork.

..Actually Singapore is bad example for piracy because of few reasons..first its ridicilously small, then if there is well established space in Asia regarding piracy control, then it should be Singapore and japan..everything else selling absolutely pirated all kind of software, in belive it or not, shopping malls, just for such kind of business...and trust me, its huge malls, really really huge, you need to walk a lot to explore everything..as for Crytek, well..they must explain somehow to their directors why their game sales actually suck..so, Windows ,PC and piracy are always easy way..

well be interesting to see their explanation after they trash the next 10-20 millions on PS3 - XBox 360 because the game will be overexpensive and still offers nothing for the bucks ...

Seems like quite some designer still designs the games by the old meansing "users are happy with 10 hours of content" but forgets that the games today are nearly twice as expensive as they were a few years ago (at least on PC, on consoles they are only a little bit more expensive)

To be honest, I think the FPS genre is as stale as month old bread, no matter how glorious they make it... Its the same old same, run, point, shoot, run, point shoot, run, point, shoot etc etc

I'm personally pretty much done with that now and the only time I would think about buying it is when I see it at PC World in the '3 for £20' section.

A few years ago releasing a top notch technology fps game would have worked out much better. And some years before that it would have been a killer as people were begging for games which utalise the power in their gfx cards.

Times have changed a lot since then and more and more people aren't willing anymore on spending more money on a gfx card than you can get a complete console for. The gfx market still is rising but this has mainly nothing to do with the high end/enthusiast segment. I think the gfx card vendors more and more are getting this too and in the future they also will focus more on the mainstream segment. Even chips like the Fusion could do pretty well if they make sense from a performance/price relationship.

Additionally Crytek also got bashed because some people were complaining about the demanding hardware which also isn't the whole truth as you can still run the game well with lower setttings. The gaming history has born more demanding and less enjoyful games than this one. A perfect example for beeing at the wrong place to the wrong time.

With things like the Wii, the rising importance of low power/mobile market, big publishers discovering casual gaming and Apple using gfx technology one or two generations behind, this trend will continue for some further time till we again reach a state were you might again want the best you can get. Maybe a raytracing influenced technology will be the initiatior then.

The last games i've played (Sam&Max S2, Zak2 Between Time and Space) were running well even on a really outdated GeForce 3 Ti200. Personally i would be happy with a computer which gives me the best which is possible in a completely passiv cooled system.

I think the biggest problem is games are kind of boring these days, whether its consoles or PC. People are less willing to spend big chunks of money on games that are the same games they played the last decade with nicer graphics and physics.

Developers need to innovate in other areas like AI but still seem fixated on graphics because thats the first thing marketing and the press get to peddle to consumers.

20 years of gaming and it all seems pretty dull now.

I totally agree. That's what the best programmers here are going to chang, maybe- I hope! :-)

Basically they are convering up shoddy coding and the infinite system configurations to code for with moving over to fixed platform systems. Then you are guaranteed to see shoddy ports back to the Windows platform.

Of what? brokend lousy console games? :)

But I agree: The money and time invested into the last decade is what hurt them. They invested in eye candy shit instead of what drives the game further. Its not visuals, it must be believable, you must be able to think that you are in the game and the like. You must a world that behaves like that as well and the most important: Games where you are the one and only ultra cool hero suck. The only game I would accept that is Duke Nukem Never but just due to the style of him and his attitude :)

I think graphics will always sell games too, simply because we're visual beeings. It's just that it doesn't make a lot of sense utalising hardware (in a effective way beyond the usual things like resolution, sizes and so on) which is beyond what consoles or the mainstream segment on computers offer. This market will get smaller and smaller. It really takes something outstanding to break out here.

As for enjoyable games i think some games try it with gameplay others with graphics, art, story, gameplay, input devices, ... and sometimes all comes together. In the end what counts is if you feel entertainted. If that happens, mission accomplished. I wouldn' t mind too much which aspect is responsible for this as long as you are free to choose.

The hunt for graphics is due to that computer graphics still aren't convincing enough and way too technical. Shadows, Lighting and such things are so normal in real life but when it comes to computer graphics they still are a pain to deal with. I guess once we've reached a state when these things are easier and more normal to use then people will focus on the other aspects again, the same like it went in the film industry. And whilst we're going this route there always will be highs for gameplay, graphics or some other aspect.

I think that most of the games which are released today are boring. This for sure has many reasons like the quantity of games released today, the different market, other developers and such things but i also wouldn't deny that part of the problem might be me because i'm heavily influenced by the first video games and therefore i do see things through other eyes as for instance younger people who missed those experiences. There for sure are classic ingredients for a good game which always work but i just don't think that's the whole story.

I love FPS games, Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life being my favourites. I tried the Crysis demo and didn't like the gameplay, but the graphics were nice. I've got the hardware (8800GTX, 2gb RAM and Core2Duo 3ghz), but I don't want to spend money on something I won't play.

I agree that graphics will always be the main aspect of gaming. Hardware (and software) should always evolve to produce the best results possible... But hiding a flogged genre under a little gloss doesnt work for me anymore.

I'd rather crank up Caprice and spend an hour or two playing SpinDizzy (One amonst many), or download a couple of old classics for the Wii's virtual console.

If you can't compete, blame piracy.

It looks more like a roadmap than a decision, without the need to announce it looking for excuses.

There isn't a solid reason to narrow production to a single platform if you can do otherwise. If they didn't do so, they probably weren't ready: an efficient multiplatform engine costs more time, money and dedication than a windows only engine.

The company after all is new and started out small... they also admitted that they couldn't license the Far Cry engine just because they lacked the experience and the resulting code wasn't flexible enough.

With their next title they'll probably be ready for porting, as they were ready to license their engine this time.

If their engine was ready for porting, I bet they would have already released it at least for the X360.

One thing I wonder about a lot is that no matter what you do, you can only get a fraction of the total users.

DirectX9 is XBox and Windows only.
DirectX10 is the worst, with support for Vista only.
OpenGL is WindowsXP, Vista, Mac, Linux, wii, and PS3, but no XBox.

DirectX9 is the most widely compatible on the most important platforms, but it seems kind of backwards to develop for DX9 when DX10 is out. But I guess that is what people are doing.

It seems like a strange situation when developers aren't using the latest version of DirectX.

DX10 at the moment are just used for the graphical edge (and the few ones who can get the benefit of it), which isn't even so important at this point in time. No one has coded a DX10 only game so far, if memory doesn't fail me.

X360 accounts for the 33.4% of the console market, so a multiplatform engine can't ignore it even though though it requires quite an additional effort (it also gives better windows support for games with low-spec requirements).





It's more about the setting and plot development than the story. Halo is quite thin compared to epic sci-fi classics, but it worked nonetheless.

I for myself didn't like Far Cry for the lack of interesting setting and plot development though it shines on other aspects, and didn't bother with Crysis because it looks more of the same, this time with the inclusion of the usual destructive alien race. Games such as Halo are not short of issues but hit the kind of audience that was left sitting while everyone else pleased fantasy fanatics (being space opera fans, where the last good example suited for a FPS was, in cinematography, Starship Troopers ten years ago).

Anyway, while the critics acclaimed Crysis, just one of the people I know of was interested in it, the one being a hardware and FPS geek... needless to say, many are interested in GTA IV or other mainstream series.

I would blame it both on marketing and narrow audience (I rarely saw TV ads for PC games though).

What I am saying is if they had released Crysis for the XBox, you would not hear all these explanations from console gamers about why the game failed to interest them, lack of plot, etc. They will just buy whatever they are told to.

I understand that a great deal of Halo's success depends on its massive marketing campaign, but it must be said that Crytek's single player campaigns are some of the most uninspiring out there (even the title, Crysis, is a pointless name based on their company name).

You are right about the userbase though... however it's not about console gamers, it's just that console games are played by a wide range of people, and the majority of population is not made of thinkers. When producers want to widen the audience, they always dumb down the product (think about reality shows). Of course I am against overly complex interfaces and obstruse gameplay, but it affected everything else as well to the point that most high budget titles bore me in just two or three hours.

Crysis is containg copy protection thing that nukes the CD.. Typical the indystry that dont get that they kill the earth by the broken dish and dvd bays.. :/

also my computer cant handle 2.000.000 polys.. it can only handle 500.000 per fps.

I'm actually a big fan of crysis as a FPS sandbox in early levels it can't be beat. There are so many ways to play it. I think it mainly disappoints run and gun FPS gamers, where I like a slower stealthy strategic FPS game.

Crysis has a much higher immersion than other FPS, just simple things like telling the direction of incoming fire from bullets bending and snapping foilage that gets in its path gives you a lot more information and reminds me a lot of paintball.

The problems are more to do with a disappointing shallow cliched story, annoying silly brutish grunts that I as a player can not relate to. Same probem with Epics games whether its unreal or gears of war, the games are dumb. I quite liked the way HL2 went except the gameplay is generic run and gun action and doesn't require a lot of thought. But I did like the characters :).

I really like the game, immersion is pretty good. I found some annoying problems on the physics engine. for example I got killed because I wanted to pass somewhere that was cluthered with debries and accidentally I got killed by it without it falling on me. Or carrying a container and dropped it on the wrong angle and poof, dead. Another one; I blasted a tank with a red barrel, the tank went in the air spinning madly and then landed but continued spinning indefinately. I had to pass right beside it so I used the "fast" mode but hesitaed because I didn't want to get killed by the spinning tank!! How about a Korean helmet stuck in the air? I've seen many things stuck in mid air in Crysis, or me passing through rock.

Also the shadows were often buggy, or wrongly rendered. In the sense that it didn't make sense to have the shadow show in such or such way, or the chunkiness, or the contrast was wrong.

In this game, Koreans are really idiots. Like, one Korean asks another to come in to hunt me down, but he's alone! Or, he's saying "he dead!" but actually I cloaked. The often heard "Where did he go?" made me laugh, even thoe I wasn't leaving anywhere, but just moved a few feet away behind a rock. A Korean saying "reloading" while he is alone is priceless...

Finally, some scripts with the speech was off sync with the facial animation, in the cut scenes. I found a lot of buggy cutscenes that didn't blend well with the playing.

The Crysis experience is jaw dropping but often laughable...

Example of physics bug:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdRgLDpRQmw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukBBvlxPcn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-keAQdXBDiY
Korean bugs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTk1t7GLwyQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIOAFeFqJEs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUnQoJQiTVY

Bit off topic here, but I doubt that since at least here in Quebec you can get WoW for European servers (for the francophones.) Also it's not impossible to proxy traffic through an IP in the US/EU/etc.

Crysis was fun for the first bit, but kind of lost the plot later in the game. I wouldn't exactly recommend it as it's nothing special to play and the system requirements would keep out most people I know.

Hahah! Brilliant. It's nice to see people punished for their stupidity.