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Crysis 2 Most Pirated Game of 2011
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."
As shown on http://www.destructoid.com/crysis-2-huge-success-xbox-360-dominates-sales-197396.phtml XBox made up 57% of the sales, 29% for PS3 and PC only 14%. Probably in part to the 3 million downloads of the game via torrents.
As of June 30, 2011 over 3 million copies of the game have been sold across all platforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis_2#cite_note-62
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.