http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

"Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion - if a high quality PC game doesn't sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don't like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don't think so. People who never buy software aren't lost sales."

Before the gaming industry or Hollywood can blame piracy they should first change the images that they create of pirates. If not then I am sure that these industries will end up in Davy Jones locker!

Perhaps some people don't understand how the world works. Everything is based on economics. If something is not profitable, it won't float. Not every company in the world is a 'Microsoft' who has billions in the bank. Some comanies cannot bounce back from poor sales and such. They really do need those sales that are taken away by piracy.

So of course any company doing bad in sales will try and point the finger at piracy. While not the full picture (and sometimes a copout), usually this is at least partly true. When major games come out, with demo's avalible, there should be little reason to pirate anything.

If anyone needs to 'try before you buy' that's what demo's are for. Yet there is still lots of piracy of PC games, because the reality of the situation is people pirate because they know they can get away with it. It's a selfish reason, helping nothing and no one but themselves.

This is entertainment, a 'want'. It's not food, water or air. Games are not a 'need', or some birthright. People who claim "I wasn't going to buy it anyways" are just making excuses. If someone isn't going to buy it anyways, why do they somehow get the privledge of obtaining and playing the game for 'free' while everyone else is paying for it and driving the industry.

People who pay for their games grow the industry. The companies see where the money is coming from and make more games like that. Try the demo; if no demo is out then don't buy the game. Or if someone resorts to pirating to try some game, at the very least be reasonable and buy the games you like.

But lets face it, if everyone really followed such a creed, 'buy what you like', less complaining about piracy would be going on. Far too often people easily dupe themselves into thinking "I don't like this game enough to buy it". Selfishness is just apart of human nature and that's why companies haven't left it in the hands of the consumer, why there is anti-piracy measures, etc.

What's sad is the fact that as soon as a game's author blames piracy, many people simply stop thinking and stop considering any other possibilities for slow sales. "Piracy" is the magic word that removes all blame from the game's producer and lays it entirely on consumers. It's this kind of crap logic that results in DRM and other invasive anti-piracy measures that ultimately cost consumers even more money.

As for Crysis, all I know is that I read the reviews and tried the demo, and I have no interest in it. Far Cry was a far better game, and I bought that one. But then.... according to Crytek, that lost sale must be attributed to piracy.

This is somewhat bemusing since there were 90 MILLION sales of discrete graphics cards in 2007 with an Average sale price of $257. Surely some of those cards were bought to play games with?

HALO 3 is rendered at 1152x640 but no one complains about that. For a laugh I ran the demo of Crysis at HIGH in DX10 @ 1152x864 (a fair bit higher than HALO) and it averaged 51FPS with a minimum of 30FPS, though this was on a 8800GTX SLI system. However it looked far, far better than HALO 3.

I thank Crysis for having had me in their Crysis MP beta.

I think Crysis should go back and reread the feedback I submitted after my first and only day of testing.

IIRC, it was something like this:

System requirements/loading too high.
Eye candy nice, but not proportional to system thrashing.
WTF is the objective? I can't figure out what I'm supposed to be doing, and neither can any of my teammates.
I'm not having any fun. I would not buy this.

This reminds me of the film studios unhappy with kids texting/IMing during lousy movies 'stealing' even the opening weekend from them. If a game sucks, word gets out fast.

Oh yeah, complain about the sales of a game that is poorly optimized and requires a high end system to actually enjoy it.
I wouldn't care if crytek stopped making games for PC entirely...

It is getting sad. I recognize Crytek as a specialist in 1st Person Shooters and that they have developed one of the best if not the best 3D graphics engine on the market. It is true that the hardware requirements are very high but it also means that the game is not really here yet. Once more people posses the required hardware the more will buy the game. However, if they blame piracy for it and start looking greedily at the console market then that will be the end of their technology lead. Then they are looking for the market lead. Only on a platform as open as the PC will it be possible to develope games that exceed the normal. If they change this then they have to lower the ambition of their developers and produce games that run on everything.The managers are selling out the recognition the company has received so far.

Lets hope when they sell 4-5 times more copies that everyone within Crytek will be as happy as the manager who made the decision. What is so great about Crysis anyway? ...

I think Crytek made the right decision. Compared to the PC, consoles sell far more copies of crappy games.

What's with all you people crying about how it's the games fault. If they were the first developer to cry foul then you might have merit.
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13940

There is Infinity Ward talking about their hugely popular, well received, incredibly fun game getting pirated like crazy.

Back in the day Piracy meant buying a game, making copies and manually distributing them to yourfriends. Then it was downloading from some BBS which was a nightmare and expensive. Then you had newsgroups with manual searches, missing bits of data rendering your entire download invalid not to mention everything was split into 5 meg files. These all required the user to have a firm grasp on computers. I'm not even going to get into how everyone had dialup.

Now it's 6Mbps internet service and google seaches for a torrent file. Download, double click ,wake up and here is your game. It's far too easy these days. Not to mention the game is usually available before it comes out in stores.

With all of these developers crying foul some of you still want to blame the gamemakers despite the evidence. Get over it and buy more games. I bet half the people complaining have their torrent client running in the background.

If only integrated intel GPUs were half decent, then more people would be capable of running games in the current generation of PC games. Stupid stupid intel. Seriously ~$50 bucks more or something on a motherboard with a better integrated GPU instead of the stupid crap intel makes would drastically increase the potential customers to all PC game developers. The number of times on game forums someone comes on and asks in the tech support why their game won't run and has an integrated GPU is dumbfounding.

But who will make video benchmarks now?

They're going to waste so much money trying to get Crysis optimized for consoles. It'll end up being a mediocre experience with limbs and appendages lopped off here or there.

Although it might do quite well, especially when the star of console FPS is the Goddamn crappy Halo series.

Seriously. I never understand why so many people drooled over that game. It DEFINES generic FPS gameplay.

That game was nothing but eye-candy that ran like crap on most systems. Ofcourse it will have poor sales.

ok...and what console does crytek think their new games will run on? i highly doubt they will put out a choppy unoptimized game (like they have done previously) as it will 110% likely get nuked by the console company before it even hits the shelves, so this all just a load of cr@p to me. and to blame it on piracy? every software developer can use that excuse. just dont forget the cost of developing it on and for diffrent platforms...hehehe >:)

Maybe your game is a poorly programmed pos that has no replay value and too high system requirements? Noo it has to be *someone else's* fault. Great to see the American blame-someone-else attitude expanding overseas *sigh*

On a less sarcastic note maybe the genre they're pushing is just stangant on the PC. There are certain types of games, most notably 'strategy' (which are often tactical but anyway) that I could not see playing on a console.

If it were me making the game, I honestly wouldn't have even bothered with a PC version. Compared to their PC counterparts, console versions sell for higher prices, practically guarantee a lot more sales (UT3 for example sold 110,000 copies on PS3 compared to 34,000 copies on PC in the month after each one's release), and (I imagine) are easier to develop.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised that there are still as many companies as there are making PC games that aren't just half-assed ports of the console version [cough]Lost Planet[/cough]. Regardless of whether or not piracy has a significant affect on PC game sales, the fact is that the market for PC games is much smaller than that of console games, and all the whining gamers in the world who complain about studios lying about piracy and abandoning them won't change a thing.

Yes please start making games for consoles. My hacked Xbox 360 is just waiting, and no mod chip was required to do it.

Put all your eggs in one basket and it'll just get easier for the pirates.

I had 0 interest in playing this game pirated or otherwise. I've played far too many FPS games that are just carbon copies of each other with nicer graphics and shinier things. Boring.

Yet, another crier that picks on the industry's favorite scapegoat. Rather then accepting the reality that gaming PC industry is not what it quite was back during golden days.

It also does not help that you develop a game that way ahead of the curve for majority of gaming market. Much less unable to be played on current generation of gaming console. Eye candy can only get you so far without having solid gameplay behind it.

Earth to Crytek, you were too freaking ambitious for you own good. Just take it like a man and learn from mistakes of Crysis.

because its easier to make money creating crappy games for a console for kiddies to buy than for a pc where the audience is more mature and picky about crappy games... it's all about the money, not making good games, to folks that use this bs

That's stupid. Majority of PC gamers don't even know how to pirate games.

I just learned how like this year, and I've been a PC gamer for years and years.

I didn't buy the game cause I hate playing games at lower than highest possible settings, and with my current 8600GTS I can't play crysis at high enough visual quality.

Downloading a pirated Crysis would just take too long for me, and of course the MP wouldn't work on the Crytek servers. Waste of time.

If you have the money to buy a computer with the hardware to play Crysis properly, then you won't mind spending $50 for Crysis.

I hope they go for good. Less garbage to filter through to find something good.

I find it really funny though. The game wasn't a very good FPS, and it ran on only a few systems at playable frame rates. Not only did they limit their market with stupid system requirements, but they limited their market with a boring as hell game.

I bought it on day of release, played for 2-3 weeks (3 times through taking different paths each time.) Had a blast, and felt I got my money's worth and more.

Yeah they should just release on steam. All games should have a similar distribution setup. I haven't bought retail in like 5 years.

I want to know how they know it's piracy that's killing them. provoko posted some stats from piratebay, so it could be taken as a possible indicator of the whole picture, but either way, they don't really have any proof that piracy is the major cause. Quite to the contrary, information such as provoko's post show that, compared to other games, piracy is having a relatively small impact on their sales.

First they say it's selling poorly, then they say it's exceeding expectations, then they say it's not selling as well as they wanted and blame the gamers for it. Smart idea, make unfounded accusations at the very demographic you're trying to sell to.

Everybody's said it already. The game doesn't sell cuz it ain't worth it. Not to me anyways. I don't have to play a game with every detail cranked to 11, but I'm not gonna play a game at 1024x768 and medium details just to get 30+ fps, especially when it's major (and seemingly only) draw is eye candy. Every other game allows me to blow stuff to bits. Remember Red Faction? Got to blow walls and stuff up in that too. Give me a detailed story and a reason to try something other than headshotting the enemy into oblivion to complete the level. /end rant

While we're at it, does that mean EA's "1 million sales" figure for Crysis was bunk? I have trouble imagining the developers being dissatisfied with such a number.

If at first you don't succeed...scapegoat!

Once your game gets a reputation for being a poor experience because it goes way overboard at some points and chokes high-end systems, then of course it will get pirated, likely by many people who simply want to see what the fracas is about but don't want to part with $40+ in order to do it.

By the time the game is unconditionally playable on middle-of-the-road hardware, it will be too old too matter anymore.

I think a company should try to make good games before they can lament about how "piracy" is the problem.

I'm also inclined to note that the only whiners on the PC side of things are the companies that have released games on optical media bound to a CD key. Yeah, that protection scheme works, after all. It hasn't been circumvented every time in the last... ohh... decade.

Dumbasses.

<Most_of_the_PC_World> This game is pretty worthless as anything but a video card benchmark. *nobody buys*

<Crytek> RARGH! PIRATES!

<Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire> Hey guys. I'm slim, sexy, and electronic crack all rolled into one!

<Most_of_the_PC_World> !!! *everybody buys*

<Crytek> RARGH! PIRATES! *shoots self in face in blind rage*