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Comment by dbreunig | Hacker News Reader

Time to play devil's advocate: can you blame them? On paper, Crysis was a near flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

Crysis has been on Pirates Bay since last November and still has over 600 seeders. For most of Dec and Jan it was the top game! (http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3883491/Crysis-Razor1911) The stats were impressive enough to drive Crytek towards console development.

PC gaming is a tricky business. The counter-argument going around today is that MMO's are a billion+ business. Granted, but they phone home every time you sign on.

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I wonder how many of the downloaders were simply kicking the tires to see how well it would run on their paltry 2007 vintage hardware.

Seriously though, to play god's advocate: check out this article from the CEO of Stardock games: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-develo... (Ignore the Pirates)

Back to devil's advocate: Stardock has a good reputation among gamers for being a scrappy independent publisher, so they get some respect from would-be pirates. I don't know that a faceless megacorp like EA could play the same hand.

This just in: EA dropping dial-a-DRM.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/09/update-mass-effect-for-...

They are free to make any choices they want, and in return I'm free to stop buying from them.

It's pretty safe to assume that any good game will be cracked whatever they do. They might manage to make it so that only one twisted genius can figure it out - but one is all it takes. Once the crack is on bit torrent every one else only needs moderate intelligence to use it.

At that point the free version is superior to the version you can buy, not just because of the price but because you don't have to deal with the DRM system. Not a good way to encourage people to pay up. I'm generally against piracy but I have sympathy with people who just want their game to work without the CD or when they are away from the internet for a while.

Mind you I was never likely to buy their game in the first place - the last game I played was NWN and I only bought that because I wanted to support Linux game developers.

On paper, Crysis was a near flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

When did selling over a million copies of a game in the PC market make it a "flop"? I'm not saying piracy didn't reduce sales, I'm just not sure why people see a million copies being sold and infer that those are low numbers being greatly reduced by piracy.

Let me correct myself: it wasn't a flop. But it certainly followed an unorthodox path, bombing for the first few weeks then picking up in the coming months (absolutely absurd for a PC game).

Interestingly, this supports the "kicking the tires hypothesis" above. But I'd venture it more supports an influencer model: hard core gamers were the only consistently aware group, and their piracy adoption probably exposed those on the edge to a game that practically sells itself once you get in front of it.

But it certainly followed an unorthodox path, bombing for the first few weeks then picking up in the coming months (absolutely absurd for a PC game).

This may be related to Crysis' significant system requirements, too. People may have put off upgrading their systems until they heard whether or not it was a good game or how well it would run on specific hardware.

(Given that users can "kick the tires" just as well with the Crysis downloadable demo, I suspect that wasn't the motivation for most of the game's piracy.)

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