Crytek (Crysis), Epic (URTIII) Lost Billions of Dollars Because of Piracy

[Digital-Nitrate]

Interesting article and interview with game developers concerned over the ever increasing impact piracy is having on their sales, and how that will affect the quantity and quality of future PC games:


Crytek, Epic Lost Billions of Dollars Because of Piracy
Published on April 30, 2008 by Theo Valich from TG Daily

Zagreb (Croatia) - My former colleague Igor “Iggy” Gajic got the chance to interview Cevat Yerly, co-founder and CEO of Crytek. During the interview, Yerly was keen on keeping the lid of future projects, but he did not refrain himself from stating his views about the current state of PC gaming industry.

Said Yerli, “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. 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, to the degree [that PC gamers who] 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."

This statement confirms the attitude a lot of game developers discussed earlier this year at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys. That number is huge, and the real magnitude comes when you calculate the retail price of $49.99 (59.99 for Collector's Edition).

If those 40 million players actually paid the full price, it would have been nearly $2 billion more in Epic’s pocket book. That is more than the quarterly sales results from Nvidia or AMD. To add another perspective, the government lost out as well, because no sales tax is earned on pirated copies.

When you take into account that Crytek saw similar levels of pirated copies, it is easy to see how big of a deal gaming piracy is. Between two games there were billions of dollars of lost sales. The natural instinct is of course to hit the platform(s) where they can actually earn money, which is looking less and less favorable for PC gaming.

You can read the whole interview here.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

... We spoke with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, and learned that the Unreal Tournament 3 servers received over 40 million attempts at illegitimate access using pirate keys. That number is huge, and the real magnitude comes when you calculate the retail price of $49.99 (59.99 for Collector's Edition). If those 40 million players actually paid the full price, it would have been nearly $2 billion more in Epic’s pocket book.

Are we supposed to believe this REMOVED BY MOD? 2 BILLION dollars lost... on Crysis... on UT3... LOL!

So they are saying that if piracy didn't exist those 2 games would be some of the biggest sellers of all time!? lol

Just because you got 40 million attempts on your servers doesn't mean 40 million people downloaded it illegally. Use your head people. It could just be 1 million people trying 40 times each, or 2 million trying 20 times each.

FFS, quit complaining and make games people want to actually buy.

Call of Duty 4 was pirated just as much as any other game, and they still sold a truck load of games because once people played it they went out and bought a legit copy because it was a good game.

No one wants to spend $60 on a game that they don't even know if it will run on their PC.

 

[F1GTR]

Cevat just can't handle the fact that the reason for low sales is that not every PC gamer has a PC good enough to run Crysis well and aside from all the fancy graphics there's not much there gameplay-wise. There are many games over the previous year that had tons of success such as COD4 and The Orange Box.

 

[Digital-Nitrate]

While I tend to agree with your sentiment, I also agree that piracy is unfortunately getting so prevalent that it may very well bring an end to big budget games for PCs... which for many people is probably not a big deal. As you said, many people do not even have systems that can play these games to their full potential.

That said, if piracy continues to increase, at some point it simply wont be worth the effort to make games for the PC. After all, these game developers and publishers are not non-profit organizations, and even today, many are barely breaking even, which is why we are seeing so many buy-outs and mergers among even large developers and publishers.. and unfortunately far too many small independent developers and publishers have had to close their doors.

The future of PC gaming in terms of quantity and/or quality games sure doesn't look good right now.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

...That said, if piracy continues to increase, at some point it simply wont be worth the effort to make games for the PC. After all, these game developers and publishers are not non-profit organizations, and even today, many are barely breaking even, which is why we are seeing so many buy-outs and mergers among even large developers and publishers.. and unfortunately far too many small independent developers and publishers have had to close their doors.

The future of PC gaming in terms of quantity and/or quality games sure doesn't look good right now.

And is that a bad thing?

Talk about a market over saturated with complete crap. Maybe it is time for many companies to fold, not only on PC, but console game makers too.

Go to any game review site and check the average rating for any system out there. It is a sea of mediocrity right now. For every truly amazing game you get 100 half ass ones.

I think the industry is ready to collapse on itself, not just from piracy, but from an over saturation of really lame games.

These guys should be blaming companies like EA, who **** out a new NHL, or NBA, or NFL, or soccer, or burnout game every year.

Companies like EA are the real reason why the game industry is starting to flounder.

Why spend $60 million developing a truly awesome game when you can just update your teams rosters, slap a new slogan on it, and shove it out the door every single year?

... erm... where was I? I don't even know now, lol.

I guess to sum it all up, piracy is just one part of a HUGE problem that has many companies shying away from big budget games and posting lower earnings. If you truly make an amazing game, 9 times out of 10 people will buy it even if they pirated it before.

 

[FLK]

In regards to piracy it isn't a major threat to the large publishers such as EA or Ubisoft but it does hurt the often far smaller developers who produce for them. Publishers don't exactly help themselves either by setting over ambitious deadlines and often force developers to put out incomplete or rushed games to meet a sales date. It's a shame as you wonder if these games would have been much better if allowed to be fully finished.

In terms of quality I agree with what Rumple said but well don't get me started on that!

 

[Tornado]

Crytek's problem (as said) is that they have built a game that has so much hype surrounding the amazing graphics struggling to pull 60 FPS on top of the line graphics cards that it has lead 90% of the PC gaming public to essentially say "why bother when I can't play it?" Whether that is Crytek's fault or not is up in the air, but they certainly took no measures to prevent such thoughts.

Epic, on the other hand, simply needs to STFU. They have made the exact same game for the past 4 years now, with each one being more reliant on graphics than gameplay as the years past, that people aren't bothering with UT anymore. You wanna know why Epic is facing financial problems with each passing game? Because their entire company is run by complete d-bags. They make Gears of War, it goes on to sell millions until people begin to realize how little it achieved, so Epic somehow think that they are able to be able to make relevant comments about the industry; completely ignoring the fact that most everything they have made in the past 5 years was shallow crap in a really nice wrapper and that they represent everything that is wrong with the industry all by themselves. Furthermore, there is no way to even prove anything related to such a number in sales revenue lost, because it implies that that many illegitimate server connection attempts are all separate people; which is nowhere near the truth.

PC gaming is dead (and console gaming is beginning to be), but it isn't because of piracy. Its because of crappy, unfinished releases; companies like Epic; and strong arm bull like this.
Besides, here is the alternative.

Foreskin is right, the entire industry is in dire need of a major, 1983-like crash simply because thoughts of companies like Epic that are so widespread and narrow-minded. The domination of the "Graphics first" mantra has made the whole industry a rotting corpse of itself, a blame which I place squarely on the heads of Sony. Sooner or later, PC gamers are going to realize that most of the next big amazing graphical showcases are just 10 year old gameplay with really pretty paint (Doom 3, for example), and they will stop bothering. PC games won't take that much of a hit as graphics card producers will. However, it will then destroy the console market.

 

[Digital-Nitrate]

I think someone watches too many Zero Punctuation reviews.

I think your pretty far off in terms of blame and direction, and dismissing the impact of piracy on this and other industries seems very short sighted in my opinion.

That said, there are a lot of brilliant new games in development, even from Sony, that have very little to do with graphics but rather focus almost entirely on gameplay. Just look at echochrome... you couldn't ask for a more plain Jane game in terms of graphics, and yet the gameplay and custom level design are brilliant and extremely unique!

Or how about the games utilizing the PS3 Eye in completely new ways like Eye of Judgment, Operation Creature Feature, Trials of Topoq?

In fact, if you look at the video clips in this post, you'll see they are developing some really impressive new camera technology that will allow developers and gamers to capture real items and/or drawings and immediately place them in a game and apply a physics engine to them.

While LittleBigPlanet won't be coming out until later this year, it has the entire gaming industry in a buzz over its extremely unique gameplay and design... although one could argue that it also has some nice graphics as well.

Where are these types of games on the 360 or PC?


These are just a small sampling among many examples where game developers, and specifically Sony are not just re-hashing 10 year old designs or sacrificing gameplay for graphics... although I will agree there are some big game developers, especially for the PC that are doing just that and as a result I also agree that PC gaming is in for a very rude awakening in the not so far off future.

 

[Tornado]

When I said I place the blame on Sony, I wasn't referring to the PS3.

Also, make no mistake, I understand that piracy is an issue. But both Crytek and Epic (especially Epic) are way overblowing the impact it had on sales, and it seems they are using it as a scapegoat (particularly Epic) to mask the actual problem. One could also make an argument that this announcement is just a knee jerk reaction that happens every time a huge PC game is out for a couple of months. Namely, because of lack of standardization, after a short period PC games have insane price slashings while console games can stay the same price for years.
Also, as the music industry has unintentionally shown us, if people love a game enough after pirating it, they will usually buy it. I bought an R4 for the explicit reason of not having to buy any DS games, and I still went back and bought up all of the Phoenix Wright games after beating them, for example.

 

[Joey D]

Crytek's problem (as said) is that they have built a game that has so much hype surrounding the amazing graphics struggling to pull 60 FPS on top of the line graphics cards that it has lead 90% of the PC gaming public to essentially say "why bother when I can't play it?" Whether that is Crytek's fault or not is up in the air, but they certainly took no measures to prevent such thoughts.

Epic, on the other hand, simply needs to STFU. They have made the exact same game for the past 4 years now, with each one being more reliant on graphics than gameplay as the years past, that people aren't bothering with UT anymore. You wanna know why Epic is facing financial problems with each passing game? Because their entire company is run by complete d-bags. They make Gears of War, it goes on to sell millions until people begin to realize how little it achieved, so Epic somehow think that they are able to be able to make relevant comments about the industry; completely ignoring the fact that most everything they have made in the past 5 years was shallow crap in a really nice wrapper and that they represent everything that is wrong with the industry all by themselves. Furthermore, there is no way to even prove anything related to such a number in sales revenue lost, because it implies that that many illegitimate server connection attempts are all separate people; which is nowhere near the truth.

PC gaming is dead (and console gaming is beginning to be), but it isn't because of piracy. Its because of crappy, unfinished releases; companies like Epic; and strong arm bull like this.
Besides, here is the alternative.

Foreskin is right, the entire industry is in dire need of a major, 1983-like crash simply because thoughts of companies like Epic that are so widespread and narrow-minded. The domination of the "Graphics first" mantra has made the whole industry a rotting corpse of itself, a blame which I place squarely on the heads of Sony. Sooner or later, PC gamers are going to realize that most of the next big amazing graphical showcases are just 10 year old gameplay with really pretty paint (Doom 3, for example), and they will stop bothering. PC games won't take that much of a hit as graphics card producers will. However, it will then destroy the console market.

This post needed to be QFT'ed. You have pretty much hit the nail on the head with the problems of modern game. There are to many half assed releases that look at graphics over anything else. This is my main issue with GTA right now.

 

[Jedi2016]

I think there's something wrong with a person who can spend several thousand dollars on a rig to run Crysis, but can't spend thirty bucks or so on the game itself. The game is cheaper than any single component in the entire computer, and yet they have to have it for free. Hypocrites much?

 

[Casio]

A game that they throw in for free on a number of graphics cards most people would use to need to play the game at that.

 

[Delirious]

I think there's something wrong with a person who can spend several thousand dollars on a rig to run Crysis, but can't spend thirty bucks or so on the game itself. The game is cheaper than any single component in the entire computer, and yet they have to have it for free. Hypocrites much?

It's much easier and much less unlikely to get caught stealing digital copies of games than to steal the hardware needed to run such things...

 

[Wolfe]

Toronado already said it all. I have nothing to add. 👍

 

[Rainmaster]

Call of Duty 4 was pirated just as much as any other game, and they still sold a truck load of games because once people played it they went out and bought a legit copy because it was a good game.

indeed but "Call of Duty 4 Developer Laments PC Game Piracy"
http://www.guru3d.com/news/call-of-duty-4-developer-laments-pc-game-piracy/