Crysis Developer Puts Piracy Ratio At 1:20

A new interview with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, has seen the Crysis developer suggest that the ratio of legal to illegal copies of key PC titles could be as high as 1 to 20, as he discussed the past and future of the franchise. Talking to consumer website IGN, Yerli admitted that the release of PC exclusive title Crysis had commercial targets “that were not met”, but expressed general satisfaction with the critical response and indicated that the developer still made a profit from the game. “The [reviews] were slightly under the critique level that we wanted to have, but that's life,” said Yerli. “We may have failed a little here and there, but overall Crysis I would say it didn't do excellent, but it did good.” As he has done previously, Yerli expressed regret over confusion regarding the game’s minimum system requirements. He also suggested that the game may have been previewed too far in advance of its release, with subsequent delays meaning that many journalists were overfamilar with the game’s set pieces while reviewing. “I remember their eyes when they saw it for the first time. They were blown away by it. But by the time they saw it four or five times, they were already, let's say, used up with it. The first impact effect was missing, and hence I think a lot of reviews didn't look over that fact,” said Yerli. “We revealed too much of the mission, we revealed almost everything of the game previous to release, and I think that was a big mistake certainly not to be repeated ever again,” he added. Regarding the PC industry in general, Yerli speculated that the ration between sales to piracy is probably between 1 to 15 and 1 to 20. “For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry,” he commented. The developer announced in April that it would no longer be creating any more PC-exclusive franchises, although thus far the company has resisted developing any version of Crysis for consoles. Instead, Yerli confirmed that the proprietary CryEngine technology was already capable of running on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but that the first game to use it was not related to Crysis.