Crysis is languishing in sales
There was a time when Crytek took pride in making Crysis very punishing on your average systems. The company’s senior game designer even boasted that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 don’t have “sufficient power” to run Crysis.
Fast forward to present day.
The NPD Group recently revealed that Crysis sold just 86,633 units last November, following its release on the 13th of that month. Sure, the game may have scored big on reviews, but nobody wanted to buy it because the game was simply too punishing to run.
Strangely, Unreal Tournament 3 for the PC was also languishing in the bottom of sales, garnering a mere 33,995 units. However, Epic is still fortunate because their multiplayer-only shooter is also released for the 360 and PS3, meaning sales would get better.
Better than Crysis, at least.
UT3 runs much better than Crysis, so this could be attributed to the FPS market being overcrowded. Yes, 2007 is the year of the FPS, thanks to hits like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, and The Orange Box (which is five games in one), among others.
What’s the lesson here? If your game is a pain to run, don’t brag. If you’re reading this, Crytek, you should remember that the most common factor among best-selling PC games is that more people can run them upon release.
Tags: Crysis, npd_group, playstation, playstation_3, xbox, xbox_360
18 opinions for Crysis is languishing in sales
Chris
Dec 19, 2007 at 5:24 am
A good point, and a valuable lesson for Crytek.
Valve got this right with HL2. Shortly after buying the game my DX9 graphics card died and I switched back to an old DX8 card. When I tried to run HL2 I was amazed at how good the game looked and how smoothly it ran, even though it was using the old technology.
It might take a bit of extra development to make a game run on a wide range of hardware, but if it means you’ve got a bigger potential market then it surely has to be worth the time and effort.
Droniac
Dec 19, 2007 at 5:47 am
With anticipated sales for US stores being at 60,000 units - 86,000 is actually surprisingly good. That’s more than 40% extra sales over what was expected by EA!
Besides, I hardly know any PC gamer who still buys their games ‘offline’ - and Crysis is selling very well in Europe.
Plus - PC games sell consistently over a long timespan, console games do not. That tends to skew intitial sales figures in the console game’s favor, even if final sales statistics end up being in the PC game’s favor. Examples: The Sims, World of Warcraft, Lineage - none of these sold millions overnight. Heck, Unreal Tournament sold more in 2000 than it did in it’s release year of 1999.
Meanwhile Halo 3 sold the bulk of it’s units in it’s first few weeks.
Mike
Dec 19, 2007 at 10:13 am
Yes, selling 86,000 units for a resource hog is surprisingly good.
However, meeting or exceeding anticipated sales do not make bad sales figures acceptable. Admittedly, the game was just released and that figure will rise eventually, but naturally you should anticipate that future sales (after November ‘07 at least) will eventually taper off.
That means yes, Crysis will eventually reach the 1M mark, but don’t expect it to happen within the decade. It’s going to happen, but it would take much longer than those terrific, scalable games that run great even on older rigs (see Chris’ response above).
Don’t confuse EA’s projections for success. Crysis would not sell nearly as good as say, Half-Life or Half-Life 2.
FYI, retail is still king, so if you’re going to factor in online sales, it won’t make much of a difference. You may have 80% of your friends buy from online, but I’m sure this informal statistic won’t make a dent in the miniscule 0.5% of all full-game sales were made via digital downloads, and that’s including both the PC and console markets.
Don’t believe me? Read this.
You cited that Crysis made #1 in Germany, but since it’s a much smaller market compared to the U.S., does it really matter? Crysis’ victory in Germany is pretty much canceled out in Spain because there’s no sign of Crysis in the latter’s top 10.
Like I mentioned, 2007 is the year of the FPS. The genre is currently too crowded, so releasing them close to each other tends to cannibalize sales. Add to the fact that Crysis is a resource hog, and you’ve got yourself a liability when it comes to sales because you have less people wanting to purchase it.
You think the consumers are waiting for an upgrade? Only the hardcore does this, and you should know better that the hardcore market does not drive sales because it’s a small fraction of the total. The game with the wider audience is what hauls in the cash.
If you look at other factors like PC market penetration and average PC specifications, then you would really see that Crysis is aimed at a much smaller market than best-selling PC games.
Let me reiterate: don’t allow EA’s low projections to fool you into thinking that Crysis is selling well. If you use sales over time as a factor for good sales, then every PC game ever released has a potential to make the best-seller list.
But you know what? They don’t make the list.
Why is that? By the time the hardware advances and is powerful enough to run a hog like Crysis easily, PC gamers would look to purchase the current, better-looking game that they’ve been anticipating for quite some time.
Droniac
Dec 19, 2007 at 11:03 am
The German population count is about 1/4th of the population of the United States - so a small market? I think not.
Also your link does not include ANY statistics for web shops - which is not the same as bricks & mortar retail - and coincidentally THAT is what I as referring to with online sales. This is what’s grown to be HUGE over the past couple of years, particularly amongst PC gamers (although I wouldnt know about American PC gamers, just European PC gamers). And no, these ‘webshop’ sales are not counted by NPD in their statistics.
Furthermore, Steam really didnt pick up until very late into 2006 and this year. It’s in 2007 that Steam really started adding tons of games to it’s direct download lists, who knows how much that % has grown (although to be fair, I’d be surprised if it had even grown to just 1%). Plus, both Crysis and UT3 are available for digital download - in 2006, almost no games at all were available for digital download. There has to be some reason that 0,4% was attained, that reason is digital download games, like Crysis. Who says digital download doesn’t account for 30% of Crysis sales (ridiculous I know), those statistics certainly don’t prove otherwise.
I’m not saying Crysis is going to be some bestseller rivalling (way overhyped games like) CoD4, but to consider it’s sales poor with zero perspective on what regular PC game industry sales are like and it’s overall worldwide sales performance is - just doesn’t seem right.
Sure it’s way too demanding - and that will hurt it’s sales, but on the other hand; it’s also a reason for some gamers to actually go out and get it. There certainly are plenty of gamers who wouldn’t have gotten it, had it not been so demanding and high-tech. There’s two sides to this story.
And who says Half Life 2 really sold significantly better in it’s first month? I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the difference isn’t nearly as big as you make it out to be. 86,000 is quite a lot of units if that accounts for only 30% of the first month’s sales when you incorporate the rest of the world and the internet. Especially if that’s a relatively static figure for the first couple of months.
A lot of the games in your wikipedia link were actually notorious for bad performance when they were released. Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, The Sims 2, World of Warcraft, Oblivion, Battlefield 2, etc, etc… Sure some of them might have been perfectly playable on old systems in low detail, but then: the same goes for Crysis.
As I said: UT had the bulk of it’s sales (think 75-80% range here) in the year after it’s release. The same goes for UT2004 and Far Cry. Heck, Supreme Commander - a similarly demanding game - is still sold out everywhere. I’ve been waiting 3 months for my copy and the supplier still can’t scrape enough copies together to supply local stores with any.
It’s impossible to judge these statistics properly without comparitive figures for other, similar, PC games, which I have not been able to find. That’s why I raised some questions as to the ‘assuming’ nature of coverage for this ‘news’ on my blog.
Chad
Dec 19, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I bought this game and finished it already. I was amazing both from a playing experience and visually. I built my system almost 2 years ago now and have not upgraded at all, although it was superfast when I built it. There were some pretty choppy parts of the game and I certainly couldn’t max out the options, but it was still quite nice to look at. I over clocked my Chip and GPU and it improved the performance. Awesome game and certainly ahead of its time, so I think it will have a long shelf life. Sales will trickle in for them.
Daniel Primed
Dec 20, 2007 at 5:48 am
Hey Mike, I can understand your point here but I am afraid that I have to disagree. I think that the problem lies with Crysis being illegely downloaded. Take a look at this article:
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2007/12/17/download-crysis-for-free-you-sir-are-the-thief-that-made-this-great-game-bomb.htm
If you factor in the people that pirated the game then it becomes clear that there is actually quite a demand for the game. I personally think that PC gamers would buy it even though it looks average if not running on optimum hardware.
I think that the dedicated fanbase of Unreal would have probably would have resulted in less illegal downloads but then again I don’t know much about this scene.
Mike
Dec 20, 2007 at 10:45 am
@Droniac
Very good points raised. Admittedly, I will get a copy of Crysis in the future because it’s impossible to run on my still-decent rig. But when would that be? Perhaps after this console generation.
I’m too cheap to upgrade.
@Chad
That must be some awesome beast you got there. Mine is still decent, but it’s already having trouble with Gears of War.
@Daniel
Very interesting bit on Crysis’ piracy. If this were truly the case, then Crysis is in crisis (sorry). However, it’s unfortunate because the game is actually cheaper than those other console shooters.
In fact, Crysis is way cheaper than the other PC shooters I’ve seen.
Daniel Primed
Dec 20, 2007 at 5:21 pm
I guess you have to weigh up the piracy between all of the games to get a fair judgement but interesting in anycase.
Droniac
Dec 21, 2007 at 5:33 am
Interesting link Daniel. It’s a shame so few PC gamers have the decency to buy their games. I buy all my games and can’t really understand the reasoning behind not doing so, when a demo is already out.
It’s certainly not ‘trying before you buy’, the (large) demo was plenty for that. Nor is it the pricing, because PC games are very inexpensive nowadays. I can get Crysis for 35 euro and Quake Wars for 30! The Orange Box? 34 euro! That’s nothing! A new console game would be twice that price!
If you can afford a PC that can run Crysis in high detail, then you can afford to shell out some cash for the game itself as well. There’s really no excusing PC game piracy nowadays - the games are inexpensive and even available via digital download channels. Anyone who still does PC game piracy in this day and age - is a cheap bastard who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about PC gaming.
Mike
Dec 26, 2007 at 9:18 am
Very good point Droniac. If a PC gamer can afford to run Crysis with all the eye candy, then they should be able to afford buying an original version of Crysis.
Crysis is quite cheap compared to other AAA titles, so downloading the game illegally is something to be frowned upon.
Rumor: Crysis is going to the 360?
Jan 3, 2008 at 10:47 pm
[…] Crysis is really selling well or not, is up for discussion. What’s undeniable is the recent buzz that Crytek’s resource hog game is […]
Cold0ne
Mar 25, 2008 at 10:37 pm
The thing is, when you are switching through the gfx options on a Core 2 Duo 3ghz with 3gig ram and a 8800 gtx superclocked, the game runs like a lightweight app, but then you realize the gfx really arent THAT hardcore. there isnt so many more polygons than other FPS out there at the time, even comparing the gfx to Far Cry from 2003. I think the makers of this game decided they werent going to spend a lot of effort on getting this game to be more compressed, not fat bloated unoptimized textures which require higher end hardware just because the developers were lazy. They decided screw it, whoever doesnt have UBER hardware cant play this, fuck them. Even on low settings this game takes a god damn ridiculous amount of hardware to render and then the gfx are comparable to a game from 2005 which took WAY less hardware to run smooth. This is PROOF if they had programmed and optimized the game to not be bloatware then it would run on systems 30-50% less hardware heavy and achieve the same framerates.
Just think, certain games from 2002-2003 which had to optimize visuals and sounds so they could run decently on the computers of the time still achieved some phenomenal graphics. Now imagine if video game developers did the same optimizations for games today, first of all they wouldnt take 8 gigs to install, more like 2.5, and would run 50% or more efficiently than they currently do, and would still achieve the same graphics quality as they do being fully bloated and hardware abusive as they are now.
Mike
Mar 26, 2008 at 12:54 am
Agreed, ColdOne. You think Windows has something to do with this? From what I know, Quake 3 can run on a 486 machine if the OS is Linux.
Who knows? This could be some huge conspiracy to help propagate Moore’s Law or something.
Cold0ne
Mar 26, 2008 at 2:48 am
Mike, I had no idea Q3 could run on a 486! What kind of video card? I know I was able to get quake 2 running on a 486 with a 2mb visa card in Win95 but it was 5fps. I know for a fact that windows vista is a memory hog compared to winxp, as crysis runs slower in vista (by about 10-20fps) with the exact same settings as in winxp. this could be due to dx10 being used by default in vista. But I thought the DX10 stuff only comes into effect when you set it on Ultra High which I never did, both OS i had it on High.
Mike
Mar 26, 2008 at 3:03 am
I’m not sure. An über PC geek friend of mine used to do this for a living, so I’ll have to ask him about Quake 3 for Linux.
Quake 2 runs in a Win95 486? Will wonders ever cease. ;)
I don’t know about DX10 kicking in only at Ultra High. If you’re using Vista, then I guess you’re using DX10 all the way, no matter what detail settings.
Cold0ne
Mar 26, 2008 at 3:25 am
well in XP you cant set higher than High settings, Ultra High only available in vista so i bet its all dx10 specialties there. But I loaded savegames in XP and Vista both set to all “High” settings and vista looked only a slight bit better with the lighting quality. On Ultra High everything was noticeably better but even my 8800 then lags in in certain situations so i guess you need an SLI setup to run that smooth.
Droniac
Mar 26, 2008 at 3:34 am
I don’t think this blog entry is really accurate anymore. It looks like I was right in doubting the impact of these early figures on the overal sales picture for Crysis. Mike, you had said that it’d take more than a decade (exaggerated, obviously) for Crysis to reach 1 million sales. Yet it did so in less than 3 months: in January EA announced that Crysis had passed the 1 million copies sold mark. (see google for a few thousand hits)
Perhaps sales picked up in the US afterwards? Maybe digital downloads and online sales count for a significantly higher percentage of sales with Crysis? Or maybe it just sold that much better in regions where PCs are actually accepted as proper gaming machines (Europe)? Whatever may have caused it, one thing is certain: somehow Crysis sold very well indeed.
Mike
Mar 26, 2008 at 3:49 am
@ColdOne
I remember making an entry about running Crysis in XP at the highest settings. All you have to do is copy and paste a certain line in the game’s config file.
Here’s the post:
http://www.fpsrantings.com/2007/10/31/crap-detector-crysis-is-prettier-in-directx-10/
@Droniac,
Indeed, the post isn’t accurate anymore. Glad to see that sales has picked up. Yes, Europe has a certain love for PC gaming, so it’s possible that the region contributed greatly–better than the U.S., at least.
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