Crytek no longer PC exclusive

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 30th April 2008

CryTek claims it has no choice but to make console games too if it wants to survive.

Crytek, while it maybe never had anything properly announced or set in stone, was possibly the last of the big-time developers to focus only on PC. Even Epic, id Software and Bethesda are multiplatform at best when it comes to game releases.

Crytek has now confirmed though that it will no longer be a PC exclusive developer because of industry pressures resulting from piracy.

"We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin. I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming: PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform," Crytek president Cevat Yerli told PC Play.

"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 any more.”

Piracy was also cited as one of the main reasons for the closure of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Studios and is a major concern for developers and publishers at the moment.

RockPaperShotgun recently investigated the rampancy of pirated games and found that from a single site in a single day more than 25,000 copies of Assassin's Creed PC had been downloaded illegally - and that's before the game was even released!

With numbers like those, it's no wonder that developers are now moving ever more towards the console market. Can anything be done to save PC games, or is it too late? Let us know in the forums.