Crytek Abandons PC Exclusivity Due To Piracy

Speaking with PC Play Magazine, Crytek president, Cevat Yerli revealed that they won't develop PC exclusives anymore, thanks to the platform's high piracy rate.

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis", said Cevat Yerli. "We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable."

"I believe that's the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy", he continued. "To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore."

We respect Mr. Yerli's experience and reasoning, but we must ask why does Crysis "lead the piracy charts by a large margin"?

We must not forget the game's steep system requirements. Crysis's gameplay play also is a hate-it-or-adore-it experience. In our opinion, a lot of potential buyers had the urge to play 2007's game of the year (second to Call Of Duty 4 on MegaGame's voting), but feared that their PCs weren't qualified to handle it. Obviously, piracy was the answer for those gamers' worries (not that we approve it). So of all those who pirated Crysis, we believe that the majority had PCs that aren't able to meet its minimum system requirements and some just hated the game. Some of the rest were content with their pirated copy and some decided that they liked the game enough to buy it.

In other words, Crysis's unreasonable system requirements served only to decrease its sales without affecting the number of pirated copies; and hence, caused that larger than usual piracy to sales ratio.