If you found a better way to eliminate piracy of your games, would you be more likely to develop PC-exclusives in the future?

I think we have to look at each title going forward to understand what the right platform would be. Certainly, we want to continue to provide our fans in the PC world a rich and engaging experience. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also release the same title on consoles. It takes nothing away from the PC gamer if the game is also available on another platform. The overriding concern we have heard is that the PC versions of our games should continue to play to the strengths of this platform, and we should avoid the “least common denominator” approach to cross platform development.

What needs to happen in order to eliminate piracy, and what’s your take on DRM? A lot of gamers hate intrusive DRM.

There are many approaches to dealing with piracy, and not all of them require attempting to overcome it directly with more restrictive DRM. For example, the consoles themselves are, in one sense, simply very good DRM technologies that consumers welcome and pay for, in order to receive the benefits that come with them, such as the healthy variety of games which are able to prosper in such a protected environment, and the greater ease of installation, use and reliability.

Do you think that Crysis pirates would have bought the game legitimately if illegal copies were not available on download sites?

Well, clearly not all would have. But judging by, for example, the number of users who downloaded our patches, there were a lot more active players than there were unit sales. And I think we can safely say if they were still playing the game by the time our latest patch released, and if they were playing on a pirated copy, then they were a sale that didn’t happen but probably would have had it not been possible to obtain the game illegally.

Where does the Crysis franchise go from here?

Well as you know, we announced that the game would be a trilogy some time ago. So of course, we have been thinking about the sequel since before Crysis itself was finished. We hope and expect Warhead will be successful enough that we can justify the time and effort it will take to release such a full scale sequel, but that step is still far in the future. It takes a long time to make AAA titles of this quality, even starting with the team, assets, technology and tools we already have in place.

What’s the appeal of the FPS genre? What about other genres? Will Crytek always be shooter-only?

Well one of the strongest technical appeals of the FPS genre is that it is the most demanding. When you can walk right up to any object in a scene and virtually press your nose up against it, then any flaws in its nature will be immediately apparent. Making sure an object looks great and interacts properly when you are close to it is certainly more difficult than making something look good from a hundred feet away. And as I mentioned before, our R&D department thrives on overcoming difficult challenges. But we also know there are many other genres out there that are also challenging and entertaining.