You mean that you decided to market the game based purely on its graphics and kept talking openly about how even top-end computers wouldn't be able to run it on its highest settings? Because that's the reason why it didn't sell like you wanted. You thought gamers would buy new PCs to play a mediocre shooter and you were wrong.

I agree. This hurt them more than anything. Crysis was merely a tech demo - the likes of which you expect to see coming from Future Mark.

This was bound to happen but I'm surprised they are being so BLUNT about it. I know they are pissed about the piracy thing but if they sold more than a million copies they shouldn't be such dicks about everything. They are only hurting the ones that actually paid for the game in the long run.

For the last time. Crysis did not sell a million units. Heck, according to NPD and European tracking, my last game sold more units.

The way the EA marketing is going on this is because OEM sales - which typically pay about $2 - $5 for bundled units in video cards, promos etc, coupled with marketing fees paid by the likes of say Creative - when converted to per unit figures ends up being high. When you do the financials, you find a game that would have made, say (50K x $25) per unit selling say, (100K x $5) per unit.

So, at the end of the day, the number of units sold is irrelevent. Its the revenue (also tracked by NPD and the like) that is important.

By those numbers, if Crysis - according to EA - sold 1m units, my guess is that it make the revenue of a game that would otherwise have sold about 100K units at the normal price point.

Either way, its bad and as a developer, I feel for them.

Apart from the rampant piracy, the way Crysis was marketed caused even non-pirates to pirate it - just to see if it will run when they bought it. Either that or they didn't want to fork out $50 after seeing the results.

So, the bottom line is when you sell a 1m units of a game, nobody is going to chase you to do a patch. You want to do a patch. The fact is, doing patches costs money and someone has to pay for it. So, if the game tanked - and lost money - who wants to fund a patch? Certainly not EA.

And why is this news and everyone piling on Crytek? This is economics. May other devs have made the same statements about not releasing patches due to poor sales. Of course most of them aren't even in business anymore. But the lesson here is to watch closely who you buy products from. Then hit them - AGAIN - where is hurts when next they start shilling their games.

e.g. we released our final niche game, Universal Combat SE last Oct both at retail and online. The sales have been so-so (since its a compilation with some minor additions here and there), but being the last game in the series, we took upon ourselves to continue issuing patches. To the extent that the upcoming 1.00.06 patch (currently in RC status and being tested) started in March is a major multiplayer upgrade using code ported over from our most recent games, Echo Squad SE. (http://www.3000ad.com/downloads/ucce/ucvcf.html) scroll down to the 1.00.06 RC1 section and work your way up.

We're a small studio, so between the guys and I, we can crank that out while working on the next best thing. If we had to take ecnomics into account - especially when you consider that our BC/UC games have never been about the multiplayer experience (heck, we only have a handful of the public involved in the testing), there would be no need to do another patch (after Feb's 1.00.05) for the game because even though the legacy multiplayer engine is not as great and does have flaws and bugs, it works well enough for the type of game and its price point.

Our BC/UC games have always been about the unique all encompassing single player experience - but by the same token, the UCCE game is the last of a dead breed and from an all but neglected genre. So one day down the road someone will want to fire up multiplayer for some reason and it will work. But the goal here is to support a product as best we can for those who bought it.

At the end of the day, what keeps me in business is brand loyalty and we have reaped the benefits of that over the years; economics be damned.


This comment was edited on Jun 2, 08:01.