Crytek: Blocking Used Games Market ‘Would Be Absolutely Awesome’

In a recent interview on CVG, Crytek’s director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard detailed his hopes for the next generations of consoles.

First he covered how he would prefer to work with hardware that made the developmental process itself less difficult. As many of us have been made aware over the years by various development studios, some of the current consoles (most notably the PS3), are extremely cumbersome to develop for and can cause needless strain on the creative process. 

He said: 

[quote]The worst thing that can happen is they make something that’s very complex for developers, regardless of how awesome it might theoretically be. So getting hardware that allows you to quickly get prototypes up and running, and any kind of scalability they can offer will be great as well, as long as everyone has that scalability and not just a select few.[/quote]

Rasmus then went on to talk about the recent widespread rumors that have been popping up lately about Microsoft and Sony implementing a new system to block used games from being played without buying some manner of license online just to play the game. Apparently he likes the idea quite a bit, which is a shame given how much the used game industry helps out theirs and practically every other major developer and publisher. 

On the matter he said:

[quote]From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It’s weird that [second-hand] is still allowed because it doesn’t work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well.[/quote]

Another area of worry for Crytek are the huge number of people who pirate their titles, especially given that Crysis 2 was the most pirated game of 2011 with more than 4,000,000 copies downloaded. Surprisingly he seemed rather flattered by the whole thing, though he would of course prefer to have a larger portion of those figures as sales.

He said:

[quote]It’s very flattering and upsetting at the same time. Obviously you miss so much revenue, it’s so clear that a lot of people want to play your game but they don’t really want to pay for it, which is unfortunately really disappointing.

It’s also a little flattering because people are willing to bother download these 10GB files or whatever the game takes because they think it looks great. We obviously want to avoid that this time, but even if we can convert 25 percent of those gamers into paying customers [you have an extra million sales].[/quote]

Thankfully for Crytek I’m sure that EA will make use of its widely known and abominable practices to cut down on the piracy rate. I mean, issuing bunches of online passes, day-one on disk DLC and forcing PC users to download and use Origin if they want to play your game will all surely help out in the end right? Right…?

[Source]