Piracy is one of the most worrying trends of this generation, and no developer has been hit worse than Crytek. So what do they think about the thing that has hurt them most?
Rasmus Højengaard, senior creative director at Crytek, was asked by PCGamer what he thinks of the piracy of Crytek's flagship series, Crysis. He replied:
It’s unfortunate that you don’t win any awards for most downloaded game.
Certainly people apparently really want to play our games, they just don’t wanna buy them.
Crysis was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times within its first week of release, and Crysis 2 was by far and away the most pirated game of last year. Quite a few of those downloads came as the result of people wanting to try the hardware-vampire on their rig to make sure the game would even run, but even more of them came from people who saw the $60 price tag and had no desire to pay that much. In the case of Crysis 2 a large portion of the PC gaming community felt that the PC version was just a cheap port, and nobody likes to buy a cheap port. As such, the majority of the game's multi-million sales came from the console version.
Solution: drop the price tag on the PC to $50 and release a demo.
It's just that easy. Thank me later, Crytek.
