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Would Pirates Have Bought Crysis?
By Kris Graft
August 27, 2008
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"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."
Some argue that piracy isn't terribly detrimental to industries such as music, movies and gaming, because pirates are pirates, and they wouldn't have bought the product anyway.
But Germany-based Crysis developer Crytek doesn't completely agree with that theory.
Asked by Edge if Crysis pirates would have bought the game legally if pirated copies were unavailable, engine business manager Harald Seeley conceded, "Well, clearly not all would have."
He continued, "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."
Crytek was thrust to the forefront of the piracy debate earlier this year when president Cevat Yerli swore off doing any more PC exclusive games like Crysis.
At the time, Seeley said the title was the most pirated Crytek project to date.
Nevertheless, Crytek said the EA-published game turned a profit and sold over a million copies worldwide as of February this year. The game released in November 2007.
In the wake of Crytek's piracy concerns, consoles have become more appealing to the studio because of their inherent piracy-fighting systems.
Seeley added, "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."
The studio will soon release Crysis Warhead, a spin-off of the original, which will be PC-exclusive (the title was in development prior to the studio's commitment to multiplatform development).
We'll have more from Seeley in an exclusive soon-to-be-published interview. [The full interview is now live.--KG]
Obviously, some of us have the wrong friends ;)
Seriously, I have around 20 friends with one or more consoles and at least one PC, and none of them pirate games. Sure, the average age of that bunch is 35, but in my eyes this goes to show, that the prices aren't the offender - you simply get the bigger picture when the years start to pile on :)
Shortly put, with the correct morals - which I believe a lot of people have - piracy would not be a problem. And it's a bit hard to explain your kids, how dad gets new games without actually buying them :)
I do not think that consoles realy cut the piracy losses. I was shocked when I noticed that nearly everyone I know who uses consoles have their console modded and have a maximum of 3 original games, while always having played the most recent releases (X360, Wii, DS).
I think it is too accepted to use pirated software. The coutermeasures implemented by the industry at the moment only discurrages other customers to buy the software. Mass Effect and Spore where high on my Game list and nor droped down a lot after the anouncement of the copyprotection they have.
Piracy is something I'm definitely not big on. People work hard at these games, but I honestly cannot see anyone who pirated Crysis buying it. I know I myself regret buying it! The ending was very predictable and really angered me that they would do a "to be continued" I personally am very opposed to the "to be continued" style of games being made today.
Not to mention it took them forever to update any patches for Crysis Multiplayer and most of the problems before the first patch still persisted. I was left feeling rather empty when completing this game. Sure the graphics were cool and it was fun for a bit, but it had little to no real replay value and felt far too short. When the action finally started to get going the game ended.
Some good comments on here and some stupid ones too.
So is piracy something that every legitimate consumer and every development and publishing should fight against with all their might? Or is it the cost of doing business. I've said in previous posts that I am a manager at a Gamestop. In any retail outlet you have to find a balance between making the shopping experience easy and pleasant for the customer and making it more difficult for shoplifters to rip you off. If you make it too difficult for your paying customers to shop and browse your goods, they just won't shop there. Its not worth the hassle. Gamestop and any other retail outlet view the loss that comes from shoplifting the cost of doing business. Limited installs, SecuRom, a myriad of other methods to make it harder to pirate the game, just end up inconveniencing legitimate customers.
So again, I'm not saying that piracy is not a problem(I did buy my own copy of Crysis). But has the 'cure' been worse than the disease. Has this slow but steady march towards making PC games harder and harder to use, slowly moved consumers to consoles where all you have to do is pop the disc in.
Stardock is the perfect example of a company that is focusing on how many games it did sale as opposed to how many it didn't.
Kris, if you are watching. i'd like to see this topic discussed on the next Game Theory podcast, please.
I.... am.... always.... watching....
We make go over it next week. But last time we did, the comments turned into a flame war. At least everyone here is relatively well-behaved--so far.
The new and growing group of people that EA (and Crytek, and a lot of other companies) like to ignore is the group that would buy the game, but refuse to put up with DRM, limited installations, and other nonsense that pirates don't have to deal with. It blew up in EA's face over Mass Effect PC, and that was just the first time.
(edit - My mistake. There was earlier boycotts of games due to having Starforce DRM. The Mass Effect blowup was over SecuROM's 10 day phone home idiocy. Now there's a new wave of refusing to buy anything with SecuROM of any flavor.)
The sad fact is that they put measures in to fight pirates that have a 100% failure rate. All they do is piss off legitimate customers. Pissing off your customers by telling them they can't reinstall the game they actually paid for is a good way to go if you want less customers in the future, especially when there's a $0 alternative floating around on the Internet.
As it stands, anybody who paid for the game did the right thing. Punishing them for it is just begging for more piracy, and since they go out of their way to encourage piracy with this nonsense, I have no sympathy for them (and no future purchases of any DRM-laden game).
They can cry poor all they want, but its their own doing at this point.
I can't believe there are people who would defend piracy. It's true that not everyone would have bought the game had piracy been impossible, but for those of you who don't think piracy equates to theft, let me just ask one question:
If you can pirate - that is, copy - a car, who would actually buy a car?
If you're going to pirate, don't make excuses for it. Obviously, the people who don't feel bad about piracy have never actually created anything someone would want.
@Henryc: That example doesn't work because we're talking about information, not tangible goods. If tangible goods could be copied, we have no scarcity and thus no economy. It would be Star Trek and its replicator.
You can't argue this is theft by positing the destruction of the economy on the whole. If anything, that scenario negates the possibility of theft or piracy, since everything is infinite.
I think Seeley is wrong.
He doesn't go whole-hog and assume that all pirates would have bought his game, so he's not one of the flaming idiots that apparently runs the RIAA, but he still has too many givens.
Crysis may not have been his most pirated game, in fact, I'd guess it wasn't. He only KNOWS about more of the pirates. I'd guess it's not as unique as he thinks because Crysis required a computer capable of doing the Kessler Run. Those limitations affect the population as a whole, so not only is the pool of potential buyers limited, but as is the pool of piraters. Also, by most pirated, does he mean numbers or percentages? I remember back in the 80's, there were fewer of us, but man, I did not know a single person who used legitimate software on their Commodore.
He goes on to base this on patch downloads and makes the assumption of continued gaming FROM LAUNCH. There's a good possibility that many of the patches came from people who had pirated the game recently, or people who played, quit, than returned specifically for the patch to see what it did. These are still people that one could say would have likely never purchased.
And it's absurd to say consoles are attractive because of anti-piracy systems. They're attractive because of a huge, built-in audience, guaranteed compatibility, good developer support, and with the X360, the ability to sell small nuggets of crap after the initial sale. They've always had that, PC developers are only now seriously looking at the systems because their hardware stands up well to PC systems, something that was certainly not true in the past. And Yerli ranting about how consoles sell five times the PC sales, well... yes. Everyone who owns a game systems is a gamer, not everyone who owns a PC is a gamer. And most gamers given the choice between a console and PC version will go console.
The "it's too expensive" argument simply doesn't hold water. I live in Denmark, where cars cost approximately 3 times as much as everwhere else in the world, but we don't see an increase in car theft because of that.
No, people pirate games, cd's and movies simply because they can get away with it from the anonymity of their living rooms. It's still theft, and games at half the cost would not decrease piracy in any major way.
It's a lack of moral that makes people steal, and a lack of intelligence that makes them justify it.
I do not agree with piracy, but it has always existed and will always exist. The problem is that computer games are expensive and normally aimed at young people and students... people who traditionally do not have much money, and so the thought of getting the game cheap, or for free, is very attractive.
*Deleted, posted as a general reply.*
varl's "humorous image" aptly demonstrates the naivety of the freetard arguement, just because there is no physical product does not make it okay. The point is a product/service is being offered for sale but some people use it without paying.
I agree with Torbjorn.Caspersen's ironic point, I too know people who will buy two $500 graphics cards for their SLI PC but pirate software simply because they can; they always say things like "if I like it, I'll buy it" but their actions speak louder than words because they never do.
talba007's statement "even Crysis, the most pirated game of all time, made a profit" also reminds me of comments I've heard from pirates (not saying you're one), like "they make enough money". Yeah well who exactly are the pirates to determine that? Profit could mean they made £1, or £10, or £100, or £1000 more than it cost to make; if shareholders do not receive a decent return on investment they will simply more their cash elsewhere and we'll see the end of PC gaming. Take a look at LucasArts and "The Force Unleashed", where's the PC version?
Why pirates pirate.
A developer recently asked pirates why they pirate his game, which in my opinion is the only sane effort I've seen in this "battle royale" between devs and pirates to date. No, DRM is not an effort and it is defective by design . I understand why people pirate and as a developer (software, not games in specific) I understand the need to protect your code.
Notice how I say code. I don't care who buys the applications or who pirates it, I just want the code to be closed and unavailable to keep it from the competition. The more people that use it the better, because they aren't using something from a competitor.
e: I meant this as a general addition to the discussion, and not aimed directly at you, Tanna Tanna.
I saw this humorous image when I got out of bed this morning:
Cevat Yerli has always been one for drama. From a Shacknews interview he claims that:
"Multi-core will be beneficial in the experience, particularly in faster but also smoother framerates. [...] We recommend quad core over higher clock."
But in reality, there is no difference between the same clock speed dual core and quad core.
He did the same thing when Crysis was getting launched, mysteriously spouting garbage about how the 64 bit version of Crysis would be fantastic and perform better than the 32 bit version. In reality there was no difference. Naught, nada.
Anything that comes out of Cevat Yerli's mouth is something I do not believe. The margins when developing console games seem to be better, fine. But do not blame piracy when it comes to rocketing development cost. I suspect that the margins are better because console development is cheaper and "easier", to some extent, not having to deal with compatability issues that the PC has.
As an ironic sidenote, it has been easier to pirate games for the Xbox 360 than the PC for years, and yet developers are raving about how protected the console platforms are.
Piracy can't really be defended - yes, the industry has done a lot of strange and stupid move to counteract piracy, but odd countermeasures is not an invite to steal. I suspect that as long as piracy is easy, it will persist. It's usually far easier to find and download from piratebay than finding an online reseller, so it's really morals, no practicalities that makes users go legal.
The big irony is that a pc user can easily spend $500 on graphics card, but chooses to steal the $50 game that makes it shine.
Pretty graphics or not, there is still people out there enjoying the game, without having paid for it - and that's stealing, no matter how people try and twist it to suit their own truths.
With a lot of smaller companies buckling under the pressure to create bigger and prettier games for the masses, piracy can easily become the hair, that broke the camel's back, and we are already seeing the results, with EA and Ubisoft buying up smaller companies, so they can survive the onslaught. I can certainly understand Cryteks announcement, and I support it wholeheartedly. I have been playing games for the last 30 years, and I sure as hell want to be able to enjoy a wide variety of games for the next 30 to come.
With all the demos, previews and early reviews available, it should be possible for most players to find out, exactly what they're buying, before they hand over the cash.
So the general advice is: Buy your entertainment instead of putting your own needs first and trying to justify the crime in the process.
I feel for Crytek but they are overlooking the real problem with their title: it requires a decadent computer for maximum appeal, as the game is little more than a rehash of territory explored many times over in the past several years. It's by no means a killer app. The screens sure are pretty, but gamers these days, especially PC Gamers, know better than to buy a game they can just as well get for free just becasue it's pretty (and the reason this is especially true for PC Gamers is because prettier games means more expesnive hardware). Crysis just wasn't interesting enough. Take away all the graphical splendor and the rather hackneyed suit and it's essnetially Far Cry Redux. Who wants to buy that game twice?
This is really going to bite these companies on the ass at some point. The music industry tried shutting down pirates and all they ended up doing was forcing companies like SamGoody, Tower Records and the Warehouse out of business, and got themselves stuck in an inflexible business model with Apple where they are incredibly unhappy. This will eventually come down to whether developers and publishers will decide they want to deal with the public in a manner that treats end users with something resembling respect (See Stardock) or will they go the way of the music companies and continue to try to make it more and more difficult for their customers to use their products. I realize that piracy is a serious problem, but even Crysis, the most pirated game of all time, made a profit.
A point I'd like addressed if possible. How much does a company like Crytek spend on antipiracy tech and methods vs how much they estimate they have gained in sales?
Can't wait to read the interview when it comes.