The ”worst thing that can happen” is if it’s ”very complex for developers,” which would cancel out ”how awesome it might theoretically be.” Crysis PC piracy ”very flattering and upsetting”.
The Germany developer will be releasing Crysis 3 in 2013, but it already acknowledges it would be significantly more profitable if used games were out of the picture.
Rasmus Hojengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, would like to ‘fix to the issue’.
”The worst thing that can happen is they make something that’s very complex for developers, regardless of how awesome it might theoretically be,” he said. ”So getting hardware that allows you to quickly get prototypes up and running, and any kind of scalability they can offer will be great as well, as long as everyone has that scalability and not just a select few.”
It’s rumoured that Sony and Microsoft have a few things in mind to combat the used games market for when their next console hardware platforms launch. ”From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It’s weird that it is still allowed because it doesn’t work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well,” added Hojengaard.
Crysis 2 was declared the most pirated game of 2011 for PC, where illegal copies exceeded 4 million.
”It’s very flattering and upsetting at the same time,” Hojengaard continued. ”Obviously you miss so much revenue, it’s so clear that a lot of people want to play your game but they don’t really want to pay for it, which is unfortunately really disappointing.”
”It’s also a little flattering because people are willing to bother download these 10GB files or whatever the game takes because they think it looks great. We obviously want to avoid that this time, but even if we can convert 25 percent of those gamers into paying customers” it’s worth millions in sales, he noted.
Hojengaard hasn’t a clue personally how to tackle the PC piracy issue: ”You’d have to ask someone who knows something about that, because it’s not me.” Crytek had a little fun at the expense of PC pirates with Crysis: Warhead, as while it appeared everything was fine if you ran a cracked copy it soon retaliated by firing poultry from your gun.
Crysis 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2013.