It's hefty, alright
Gamers who wondered how much that beast of a game Crysis cost to make: wonder no more.
At the Games Convention Developer Conference (GCDC) in Leipzig, Germany, it was revealed by CEO and President of the game's developer Crytek, Cevat Yerli, it cost €15m ($22m) to create. In spite of this, the game made more than what they put in, he said, stating "if it wasn't profitable I wouldn't be able to stand here."
Yerli has said in the past the developer has "learned their lesson" with Crysis, citing it to be the most pirated game in the company's history:
"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."
If they're making profits on such an expensive game, can piracy really be the "core problem" of PC gaming? Gamers are not as simple folk as some developers would like to believe -- surely there is more than one reason console games sell better, a big one being standardized configurations, and uh, you know, generally less expensive machines (in the long run, anyway).
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Warhead turned out to be a success for them because they actually went back into the engine and started fixing up the code to run smoothly instead of going "here's a heap of garbage I hope you can find hardware fast enough to push it through"
They are the core problem, expecting people in an economic downturn to suddenly just dump a few hundred into upgrading their rigs.
It's sad because the demo stations now run flawlessly and apparently the hardware behind them isn't that hardcore anymore with the video being about a $150 investment for something that'll run it fine and other games fine for years.
In 2006 when talking with Crytek they were so full of hope that people were going to buy 4GB minimum for their system when memory prices were still sky high. I guess they got their head out of the clouds which is good.