Could a Crysis like game in 2016 be profitable?

Crysis was pirated to hell and back and was reportedly at the top of many illegal downloads websites. Crytek's Cevat Yerli even said the piracy could have been as high as 1:20. That is 20 illegal downloads for every legal purchase. Probably an exaggerated figure but you all get the idea that the game was massively pirated.

It came out in 2007 an era in which digital distribution was still in its infancy and services like Steam weren't exactly cosmopolitanism or well-known. Gabe Newell claimed piracy was more due to a service problem. PC games on general were too difficult to access(Installs, DRMS, Authentications etc). Now in 2016 it's easier than ever.

I'm asking you, in 2016 given the dominance of the digital market on the PC front, could a PC melter like Crysis be successful profitable? By that I mean a game that looks phenomenal, plays good and absolutely slaughters even 980Ti's at 1080p. Of course the game would run well on lower end hardware with lower settings, exactly like the original Crysis.

Yeah i think it would.

PC userbase is so significant and i'm sure PC gamers will welcome such a game with open arms.

But how much did it cost to develop crysis and its engine?

Well you can always slam Denuvo on it if you are so afraid of piracy hurting your sales.

yes it would.

You have to remember back in 2007 Crysis was a game that only people with top in the line rigs could run, if they did that by todays tech then it wouldn't be a profitable game.

@Juub1990: Just look at Star Citizen kickstarter success and you have your answer. PC Gamers are craving for a no-holds barred game that makes use of all the hardware you can buy.

With that said, Star Citizen is already the new Crysis, if you want top eye candy and put your newly bought machine to test, try Star Citizen.

Problem was that Crytek had the idea that the game would sell like console games hard and fast. But didn't realize that the people that had good enough hardware was light. People didn't want to play the game below high settings as well. And once the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512mb released that kick started the sales within three months a million copies were sold.

It was profitable back in 2007, so I don't see why it wouldn't be profitable now.

Good games are mostly profitable.

One and done. SC has 1M+ backers alone and it's keepign steady with each month, showing that people DO want a high end pc game.

Besides, Squadron 42 IS teh new Crysis.

Sooooooooo......

@Ballroompirate: False. The higher settings could only run on beefy hardware but the lower setting scaled well with lower-end systems.

TBH with the drought of worth buy games on consoles I think anything with shiny graphics and the word exclusive tacked on would sell well.

That depends. Did Far Cry Primal turn profit?

Crysis went on to sell over 3 million copies about a year or 2 after release (much more now) thats more than many console exclusives manage, it was the best selling game on a single platform they ever made, out of any platform they developed for and it afforded them to make Crysis 2.

It was profitable for them back in 2007 but Cevat Yerli is a greedy bastard that was never happy he wanted that COD type of money and look how they blew it, Crysis 3 sold less than crysis 1 on 3 platforms, and they pissed off their original fanbase

Also that 20 to 1 is a totally made up statistic, "Could have been" does not cut it when you are trying to prove a point

Funny how people always seem to avoid the small details, thats where the devil is.

To all people saying Star Citizen. The game will have a lot of content and will be huge and its gameplay might be something unseen but from a graphical standpoint, it's not the revolution Crysis was. It looks very impressive but it's not the milestone Crytek created in 2007. Might turn out into a better game but probably not into a better piece of graphical showcase.

I would love to see a "modern Crysis" with huge open levels, fantastic AI, destructible environments that both you and the NPCs interact with and the NPCs would react realistically when shot or stabbed and not just fight back until they are dead. All this and more together with amazing graphics that's well above games like TW3 and SW:Battlefront.

difficult to say.

the cost of making such a game now could be 10X or more as what crysis cost to make. crysis cost $22million to make according to dinternet. so looking at 110million or more (probably more...PCs have gotten a crap ton more poweful since then and we are taking about a game that will bring the highest core I7 with titanXs and buckets of ram to its knees).

thats a lot of money for a production budget. thats GTA5 type money...we are not taking anything trivial here. hell by movie budgets thats not small either. that's "ok..we could sink the company of this goes south" money.

to be honest i dont think there is any one platform that could support such a risk. sure..maybe itll hit GTA type success and maybe it will turn out well. or maybe itll tank and a crap ton of money is lost.

crysis did a lot of things to lift the bar. it wasnt just graphics. the scale of the physics system had no equal. nothing, not even HL2, was as interactive as crysis. even the AI was a lot of sophisticated than what we saw (and see) in games. sure it was buggy in places (im sure there are plenty of videos of player exploiting a weakness in the AI) but it was still a big step up.

i think the cost is too high now (the wallet, not the consoles, is the biggest bottleneck in the industry at the moment). i dont think it would make the money back on retail sales alone...or at least the risk is too high. it would probably need to sell (assuming the standard 60 quid release price) around 7-8 million units to break even.

it could, perhaps, pay off in less tangible ways.

if i was EA for example i could use such a game to build my PS5 and X2 tech off of for example. i could essentially release a PS5 game now, before its release, realease it on the PS5 when it is released and i will be further along in R&D for making the best out of next gen hardware. i can then use this tech and knowledge to release next gen multiplats faster and refine the tech as needed rather than using a PS4 engine for the PS5. this has worked for EA this gen. say what you want about the quality of their games but they look absolutely stunning and clearly take advantage of what current hardware can do better than pretty much any other developer. star wars looks better than first party efforts for example.

bugatti (well VW basically) created the bugatti veyron many years ago and they sold the car at a loss. it was a technical exercise..a peeing contest. they spent a fortune on R&D and they sold the car at a loss. on the face of it it made no sense. but it gave the brand a bump in recognition, associated it with quality and excellence and who knows what lessons learned from it were applied elsewhere?

but i dont think any one platform can support that kind of budget really....the risk is just to high. hell even with 3 its high enough that AAA development is creatively dead at the moment.

star citizen is not an example. that money raised is the production budget. in terms of revenue and profit the game has made 0. bupkis. it's not released so of course it hasn't made anything. the sales could also be depressed when it does arrive simply because most people who want it will have already bought it before release. it may never be profitable...it could just be an exercise in constant reinvestment in the game based on revenue generated (which is not a bad business model has to be said) so the balance sheet may still read 0. they have no shareholders and are not publically traded so why not?

Crysis has a demo. So, a 1:20 ratio is pretty high.

but that has nothing to do with the question you were asking. What other game is doing what star citizen is attempting to do in terms of visuals AND scale? Star citizen when finished is gonna require a beast of a system to run at full settings and givin its very sucessfull crowd funding its clear PC gamers are more than willing to spend money for it.

I think today most developers understand what piracy is, and how it actually impacts the industry, and that's why PC gets so many games today. Some of those coming out will decimate PCs.

The main reason nobody will make an exclusive FPS, or similar game is because there's no incentive to keep it PC exclusive. FPS games can play on consoles, often poorly, but they play. And shooters typically have the mosf focus on graphics.

That's exactly what I asked in the OP. Star Citizen won't be the benchmark Crysis was back in 2007. It won't bring top of the line hardware to its knees the way Crysis did and it sure as hell isn't as revolutionary graphically.

Uh yeah that game was pretty good, and there are more established digital platforms. The question isn't whether or not the game is profitable, but whether or not it is worth investing that type of money in a product like that. Which was the general issue Crytek had with "only" selling 3 million copies, with the guarantee that game development wasn't getting cheaper, and it hasn't gotten cheaper. In fact given how high the costs are, given there is good reason to believe that a successful title like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain isn't necessarily profitable, I'm not completely sure on that without ever looking at hard numbers.

And as technically well thought out MGSV is (not the texture beast you think it is, but it's a really optimized engine, it runs 60 frames across consoles, there are so many individual mechanics that play on top of each other, oh and the game is unfinished to boot), there are shit that it doesn't do, that Crysis absolutely did like as simple as how the physics engine works in that game. That type of man hour will cost a pretty penny, but to be fair that was the worst thing to happen to Crytek is that kept feeling they needed to keep pushing some visual thing, and not actually working on core gameplay. Because as good as I think Crysis is, that game should have been an elite type FPS experience, but it fucking isn't because the second half of that game is fucking TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH.

I mean so incredibly garbage as to make Ubisoft nonsense seem fun in comparison. And they made that mistake twice in one life time, because that's exactly what Far Cry is. A badass first half, but oh my fucking god is that second half garbage. The sequels to Crysis were take out all the badass parts people liked in Crysis, and just keep all the shitty things no one likes about a Crytek game. Can't imagine why their future games sold like shit and they weren't as well received as they were for FarCry and Crysis.

I'm hoping Squadron 42 / Star Citizen will be that game. The game to bring top tier gpu's to their knees. It's the closest thing we have to a 2016 Crysis.

I would think so, people were pretty excited about it.

lol wut?

Not game has the level of detail that the Old Man trailer had. The ship details, suit details and even the facial capture (animation still needs some work), considering will have dozens of those people running around in first person, is unmatched.

I hate the stupid sayig, but, screw it, its closest to looking to like pure CG so far.

And this doesn't include potential massive battles with dozens of ships on screen and/or environmental physics inside space stations. Though i expect themt o focus on the former since SC has alot fo metalic environments for obvious reasons.

yes it could

With the way people drool over graphics here I think it has a better than average chance

We'll see with Squadron 42.

If a Crysis-like game was priced right and distributed through as many online distributes as possible, I think it would do well. Plenty of PC gamers out there who are willing to punish their PC just because they can.

I don't think it would be a mega seller, but it would have strong lifetimes sales in addition to a decent launch. As people upgrade their PCs or build PCs, they'll pick up the game with the reputation of destroying PCs just to see hows their's stacks up. There is a sort of prestige to being able to play a known PC killer at a decent framerate on your PC.

That's partly why Crysis lasted so long. For so long there was a prestige about being able to run Crysis well. We don't have a game like that today because most devs aren't willing to risk it or they decided to go multiplat.

Ok , I'm Living in Iran , A Place that game companies didn't officially sell their games , Amazon , EBay and Gamestop still don't ship games to Iran and just until Recently , Iranian banks weren't connected to the rest of the world so gamers couldn't pay for games and download them . So Pirating was pretty much the only way of playing games .

Even with such situation , I can see Piracy getting rare . It is still the main way for gamers to get games but many of them will go through the difficulties of buying a game , mostly because of the Online features . DRM and Locks on games is making many games impossible to crack , Fifa 16 is a good example . also online multiplayer is a huge part of many games today and many don't want to miss that . so Piracy won't be as harsh as it was back 2007 .

The digital market is huge on pc because everyone knows and waits for the scheduled price cuts. This snt a good thing for expensive game development.

Frankly crysis 1 is the only game that makes owing a high end pc worth it. A true game built for high end PCs with no compromise . Ironically, such a thing was never attempted again despite all these presumed pc market growth claims.

scheduled? You get games under retail price before the games even release, contrast to that developer gets higher share of the actual sale vs console sale

@howmakewood:

Console experience the same thing. 3rd party developers nickel and dime console gamers. The real money they make is after the sale. However, console games are now offered under retail price before release. $59.99 priced games now tend to go for $47 on amazon.