Crytek abandons PC exclusivity

Crysis, developed by German studio Crytek and released in late 2007, was one of the most highly praised PC-exclusive games last year. It won GameSpot's Best of 2007 Editors' Choice award for Best PC Game and a host of other gongs.

However, it seems that all is not rosy at Crytek HQ in Germany. The studio's director and founder, Cevat Yerli, recently spoke out about the problems currently besetting his firm, PC gaming in general, and how Crytek plans to address the issues it faces.

In an interview with Croatian magazine PC Play, Yerli said, "We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin... PC gamers that pirate games, inherently destroy the platform.

"Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us, and I believe we won't have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore."

When asked if this meant that the rumours of Crysis coming to consoles were correct, Yerli simply stated that the port would be "impossible," saying that the game would have to be "largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3," and that Crytek's "internal focus is not linked to bring Crysis to consoles."