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 PC Gamers that 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 wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.
I think Crysis has bigger problems than piracy if they truly believe they should have done better. The game was visually amazing, but the fact they limited their audience didn't help them much. Of course, the fact they sold well over a million copies to beat EA's expectations seems to put something of a lie to their whines.
After playing through Crysis, I enjoyed the game but really felt like it needed to be longer to get my money's worth.
It's more that the consoles themselves are harder to mod chip. Of course, you pay a premium to the console manufacturer for this bonus and it pisses off anyone that wants to move countries...
The fight against piracy will reach new and unbelievable heights, since two of the most expected PC games to be released this
year, Spore and Mass Effect, will require an online validation every ten days in order to function. Even though it seems, at start, a good decision and something that might put an end to PC gaming piracy, it will still be a really controversial one and could backfire anytime at innocent gamers. However, we'll debate on this a bit later, since now we have to hear the developers' plans regarding this matter.
That's just fucked up. What they also don't mention is that you get a total of three machine activations before it doesn't let you have any more. I'll be waiting for the cracked versions before I buy it, and if the DRM pisses me off too much I'll just return it to the store.
The real problem with this decision is it will penalize the legitimate users with stupid "must be online every 10 days" restrictions while the pirates will be marketing a better and more user-friendly product. It only gives the end user MORE incentive to pirate. EA has been drinking too much Macromedia kool-aid.
Since there are legitimate problems with piracy (scale is arguable) I begin to realize the attractiveness to MMPORPGs to the game makers. They realize that the largest part of their income is from the monthly fees.
While it's still DRM, I think it's a pretty decent compromise. One-time internet activation I can deal with. EA committing to increase activations on a phone-call basis seems ok (it's what MS does with Vista) and requiring an original disc at activation time only is good news.
Finally played a bit of Crysis. It is just not that great of a game.
The sound is nice and its realistic graphics, but its too realistic and just not very fun. CoD4 is a far superior game and graphic quality is just as good in my opinion. I don't think i would even recommend anyone to play it with a pirated copy.
Having finished Crysis I correct myself and call it a bad halo clone. The only thing that was was nice was the models for the humans, but past that the game mechanics were crap in my opinion.
I really got a kick out of Crysis. Of course, being the explorer type that I am I poked and prodded everything, looked everywhere, spent time just appreciating the artwork, and generally felt like I got my money's worth out of the forty bucks I spent on it.
All that said, if it required Internet activation and there was a lifetime limit placed on the number of activations made available I'd have been a lot less inclined to make the purchase.
Crysis wasn't anything groundbreaking in gameplay, but the graphics were damn pretty and I enjoyed it a lot from that aspect, even to the point where I'm thinking of playing it through again.
