Well then they sucked in that area, too, since most of the games that use the engine are their own games.

Well and I say maxed out but there's other factors like screen resolution. If you were willing to ratchet down to 1024x768 you could probably beef up a rig of the era to handle max settings. Plus this may have been before widescreen had really taken off so there was only 4:3 to worry with.

Also, define "ran fine" - ran at max settings at 60fps with no stuttering or framerate drops? It definitely ran acceptable in some configurations on release but no one could max it out at a high resolution on day one.
But yeah that was a new idea at the time - the idea of a game being so graphically advanced that it outstripped the hardware of the era. It was always a thing that so long as you had the beefiest system then any game on the market could run perfectly. Games like Quake 3 just gracefully added features like curved surfaces when it was possible to do so. Crysis and ports like GTA4 were the first to say "no your shit still can't run the max".

To some degree it was about the messaging (had the mode been labeled "extreme" instead of "high" it might not have bothered the high end people so much) but really I think the initial issue was that the demo they released proved to everyone that it ate shit on their system. I had a 7800GT (I think) and even at the lowest settings it was crap.

As much as I like the Crysis games and Crytek's work in general, I've got a little schadenfreude going on because they were kinda pretentious dicks a few years back when they switched to console development.

For a recap: they came out with Crysis (the first one) in 2007, and it didn't sell as much as they wanted it to. They blamed piracy. I'm sure the game was pirated, probably a lot, but I don't think that's why it wasn't selling like they wanted it to. It wasn't selling like they wanted it to because it was released at a time when PC's weren't powerful enough to run it. By which I mean, in 2007 when it launched it was literally impossible to run it at the best settings. Like, it was impossible to build a PC that could run it at max settings at a high resolution at a high framerate.

And people knew this because they released a demo. You got a first hand look at how this game was going to turn your PC into a slideshow. So people didn't buy the game because they knew they didn't have the pipe to smoke it. Releasing a demo probably hurt Crysis' initial sales.

And this wasn't unforeseen - in the runup to the game's release people expressed surprise that EA, who had been all about cross platform development or cutting off the PC, here they were releasing a game just for the PC which a lot of people couldn't run.

So, the game didn't sell either because of system requirements or piracy or both. And again, I'm not saying the game wasn't pirated, I'm just saying that Crytek claimed this was the only reason it wasn't selling, and in no possible way could it be linked to the fact that they released a game which just told every PC owner on earth their system wasn't good enough.

That's not the real dick part to me though. The real dick part was when the CEO said their "proof" of piracy was that the patch for the game was downloaded more times than the copies of the games that had been sold.

OK, think way back to 2007. Hard as it is to believe, Crysis wasn't on Steam. Back then it wasn't a given that your PC game would be on Steam. Consider Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on disc-only, no digital services at all, and had GFWL baked in. Two years after that Fallout: New Vegas launches as a Steamworks title on Steam on day one, no GFWL in sight. The switch was quick but in 2007 it hadn't happened yet.

So by that logic when Crytek released a patch for Crysis, people had to go manually download it. So I can see a shred of logic to the idea that if more people are downloading the patch than buying the game then some number of pirated copies are getting patched.

The thing is, the statement doesn't make sense. How many more times are we talking here? I know back then I personally downloaded the patches a few times, usually after I would format and reinstall the game (this being before Steam made that sort of unneccessary). If the patch was downloaded 10x as much then you might have a point. But how do you even know how many times it was downloaded? The file was mirrored everywhere (I think FilePlanet still existed, etc.) did you add up all the downloads? Do all those services even give download numbers? Why are you not providing more evidence for your case?

Crytek's CEO also lamented how the Call Of Duty games were selling more copies. At the time, Crysis had sold less than a million copies whereas the CoD game of the year had sold ten million. The CoD games which had the advantage of being on consoles as well. Disregarding the fact that Crysis would hit the 1M mark soon (and according to Wikipedia has sold over 3M overall as of 2010), the CoD game sold better due to better marketing and just generally being a better game.

To be fair this was that dark era in PC gaming of the console games selling 9-10x their PC counterparts, to the point where some developers wanted to drop the PC entirely. However, if Cryek wanted to get into console gaming just do it, don't give us some sort of "you're all horrible software pirates" argument on your way out the door.

So they released Crysis 2 on PC, 360 and PS3. How did that go? They sold about three million copies, and less than the original game has sold on PC alone. Crysis 3's sales figures have not been fully revealed.

THIS is the problem I have with the "piracy is the problem" argument. Yes piracy is a problem but there's so much more to it and going to console development didn't fix their issues. Their real issue seems to be that they can't run a company worth a damn.

Welcome to Slashdot!

B-b-b-b-but fetuses don't breathe air directly! Clearly god has spoken.

The Appalachians profit hugely from misery? That's new to me.

LMAO, Taurine is not a stimulant.

Imagine a perfectly spherical chicken...

Anyone can write software

No they can't.

If you switched me with a sales guy I could do the sales guy's job on a technical level. I could talk to people, I could make calls, I could ask for money. I couldn't do it nearly as well as the sales guy and I'm an antisocial introvert so I'm all wrong for the job on a proficiency level but I could do their job, albeit poorly.

The sales guy can't do my job at all. He wouldn't know an IDE from his own ass. He has no idea how to write code. He sure as fuck doesn't know how to interface with COM objects or write cross platform code or perform code signing to get apps to run on mobile devices. Not "I can do it but not do it well", he can't do it at all. Not even halfass.

This isn't me trying to say programmers are special snowflakes, this is me saying that programming is fundamentally more difficult than anything normal people do, and most normal people don't actually want anything to do with it, which is why you often hear "hire a programmer" and not "learn how to program"

So with all due respect, no not just "anyone" can write software.

The same thing? Why would anyone put up with physical assault by a superior in the workplace?

He means day one of Hamas' existence, silly. It's p. obvious that's what he meant.

Since when is Target a "small business?"

Yeah, much better to let Amazon to run all the book publishers out of business. :rolleyes:

I don't remember people getting up in arms over Analog Rights Management.

Porno movies don't cost ten or hundreds of millions to make, and don't employ dozens to hundreds of people to create.