Crysis 2 Most Pirated Game of 2011 383
MojoKid writes "When an advance copy of Crysis 2 leaked to the Internet a full month before the game's scheduled release, Crytek and Electronic Arts (EA) were understandably miffed and, as it turns out, justified in their fears of mass piracy. Crysis 2 was illegally download on the PC platform 3,920,000 times, 'beating out' Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with 3,650,000 illegal downloads. Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past."
Re:Since when was PC gaming ever viable? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How many copies sold? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis_2#cite_note-62 [wikipedia.org]
Re:How many copies sold? (Score:5, Informative)
MW3 appears to have sold about a million copies on PC, Crysis 2 has sold about 500,000.
Incidentally, Crysis 2 sold 1 million copies on xbox360, and 800,000 on the ps3. MW3 did 11.5 million on 360, and 9.2 million on PS3.
It's still hard to derive significant meaning. MW3 has a much bigger marketing push behind it and, frankly, Crysis 2 wasn't a particularly good game. It's initially interesting that Crysis 2 had such a higher rate of illegal downloading, *but* the leak ahead of launch explains that. It's impossible to tell if the month of availability ahead of 'launch' had a chilling effect on sales (my opinion is the sales look about in line with relative popularity with MW3, with the PC perhaps being kinder to Crysis than the console platforms in *relative* terms), and it's impossible to tell how many of those downloads coincided with a legitimate purchase (obviously less than 500k, but some do buy retail and then pirate for no-cd behavior or otherwise being free from DRM) and it's impossible to tell of the rest, how many would have *possibly* bothered to pay if they couldn't have gotten it for free.
Of course the one fact to take away: DRM does *nothing* except inconvenience legitimate users. Both titles were DRM encumbered and both were copied more than they were purchased. DRM does not impair those seeking it to copy in a *significant* way, but it does cause pain to your paying customers.
Re:Since when was PC gaming ever viable? (Score:4, Informative)
As of end of Q1 FY2012, Crysis 2 sold 3 million copies ( http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=594196 [ea.com] ). Hoping we can infer from the first week sales the general proportions of sales, PC accounts for about 14% ( http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/crysis_2/news/crysis_2_is_eas_biggest_launch_of_the_year_so_far.html [videogamer.com] ).
So that's 420,000-ish copies on PC. What proportion of those torrents has to be a possible sale lost, for PC to be a viable game platform?
Re:DRM? (Score:5, Informative)
Trying to protect games makes them suck. I remember I had a game from EA on my C64 that hammered the hell out of my disk drive every time it loaded. It took almost 5 minutes to load and by the time it was finished the drive was hot enough to fry with. It finally hammered it out of alignment and I had to fix it. I finally learned at a user group meeting (when I was stationed in Germany in the 80's, damn those German crackers were good) how to strip the protection off the disk and I never, ever bought a legit copy of any EA software since. As a matter of honor I always pay for shareware but those who try to stick it to me I stick it to them. Screw EA.
Re:News Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Do your car keys lock you out of your car after you use them 5 times such that you need to call your dealer during their regular business hours to grant you 5 more accesses into your car? No? I didn't think so.
I think his point was that not all of the people asking for DRM to be removed are trying to pirate games.
Re:News Flash (Score:3, Informative)
Talk to Capcom...
http://www.dailytech.com/Capcoms+OneSave+Game+Hits+The+Mercenaries+3D+Kills+Potential+Used+Game+Sales/article22025.htm [dailytech.com]
Re:News Flash (Score:4, Informative)
OR you had those abominations where the manufacturer introduced a fault onto the disk and the game checked for that fault. Some games allowed intallation to HD as long as they were the original install disks. Some games only allowed a limited number of installs(that was at a time when HD space was at a premium and you could have only a single digit number of games installed). Some games required you to have the original floppies inserted while playing.
Now, floppies were not very relyable. Especially when in the hands of a grubby teenager. Also on the PC the drives went wrong quite often, potentially destroying the originals.
During the early CD days there was hardly any copy protection apart from checking for the presence of the CD medium. Or having most of the game on CD because the mediums capacity was close, equal or higher than HD space. CD writers were jolly expensive so copying CDs was not trivial. The old, horrid "multimedia", "interactive movie" days.
then we went again through a "damaged medium" phase making copying impossible. Then we had the offensive BS phase were copy protection software embedded itsself deeply into the OS and in some cases even made copying music CDs virtually impossible.
Then we had this "always connected to the internet" scheme.
Now we have this "value added" DRM scheme where all your stuff is in "teh cloud". Which is basically the above disguising as something beneficial.
During any of these phases the pirated version was less hassle.