I finished playing Crysis this weekend. Needless to say it’s a great game and obvious that a huge effort has been put into creating this awesome piece of masterpiece.
I read the wikipedia article about Crysis, and I noticed this in the “Sales” section:
“As of January 7, 2008 about 144,000 copies were sold globally”
Compare that to Halo 3 sales:
“As of January 3, 2008, Halo 3 has sold 8.1 million copies”
Makes me wonder :
perhaps because you need super hardware to play crysis?
I hope this will increase, since they need to sell at least a million copies to break even…
Fools should have done a bit of market research before they started coding… a shame but inevitable.
Cas
Usually most copies are sold early after the game is released, I can imagine. I doubt this will increase dramatically.
Kinda makes me wonder if we’ll see more cutting-edge tech games like this again.
I disagree Cas if you are referring to the superior hardware comment. I have a PC that cost just a little more than $1000. Intel Core Duo, 3GB Ram, Nviida 8500 card and Crysis plays great on my machine.
Crysis don’t have the history behind it like Halo does and haven’t had a chance to generate that kind of following. I imagine when Halo first came out and was new, it didn’t get the kind of sales that Crysis is getting now. I think IMHO, that the Crysis team did well. They are going to have to wait just like most new games.
$0.02 USD
Jeff E.
I don’t know pc games sold today have a big premium on ‘just released’ items.
Usually, the price drops alot as time passes. I never buy games right when the come out any more.
I suspect that the reduction in price would have more of an effect on sales than the reduction in the number of copies sold. Indie games usually sell slowly over a long period of time, whereas mainstream games might sell alot of copies early on.
I buy them for $5-$15 plus shipping on Amazon.com. Or I buy indie games, which usually cost no more than $20.
Halo sold extremely well as soon as it was released. It was the game at the time. MS and Bungie did an excellent job hyping it.
Crysis’s real problem is it’s a PC game. PC games are rapidly becoming niche. It’s no wonder most developers now write their games with ports to 360/PS3 in mind. Or just go straight to the consoles and skip the PC step altogether.
Couple of points: the PC market has not shrunk; it’s no more niche now than it ever was.
Secondly, a $1000 machine which you fairly recently bought represents about 5% of the potential market; the vast majority of machines actually out there are 3-4 years old. Meaning, about a quarter of the processing power, typically. Meaning, Crysis has no chance.
Cas
My (now retired) GF6800GT & Athlon64 3000 runs Crysis ok @ min. detail, that machine is ~3 years old. (6800 - May05, cpu & mobo. Nov04).
I don’t think much can be learnt from comparing Halo3 & Crysis in terms of total sales, they are 2 completely different enterprises.
All it says to me, is that mediocre games can be very successful on consoles, where as a PC title has to excel for it to stand a chance.
Does anyone have the PC sales for Halo3? I believe that would support my hypothesis.
Halo 3 isn’t out on PC, and given how long it took to get Halo 2 on PC I don’t think you’ll be seeing it for at least a couple of years. Both Halo 1 and 2 have been terribly ported to PC anyway - abysmal performance and bad control handling make them not worth bothering.
Personally I found the Crysis demo boring (after the first five minute wow factor of the graphics on high). Maybe if they had produced a game worth playing then more people would have bought it. 
It may be personal taste, but I really liked crysis because of it’s action-movie feeling. Gameplay was not that good as Half Live 2, but nevertheless definatly woth playing.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but that machine was a beast when it came out; it’s an even better spec than the ultra-bastard Deep Thought machine that I won from Sun 3 years ago which was the ultimate gaming rig even then. Most people don’t have ultimate rigs, just middle-of-the-road stuff. I think you’ll find a 3 year old machine is typically about half as powerful as what you had. Meaning Crysis is out about a year to 18 months early perhaps.
Cas
I’ll have to agree with Cas on this one. If you’re creating a game for a niche market (gamers with top of the line hw), you’ll get niche sales.
Maybe Crysis’ hype machine also just failed, which doesn’t help either.
It seems to me that there should be a good market for good, innovative, high production value games for PC’s of 4 years old, even if they don’t push the envelope so much in terms of numbers of polygons and such.
Yea, those games are called “4 year old games” ;D
But yes, unfortunatly, it is true. The market for cutting-edge-tech-games like Crysis is too small to make profit from.
LOL, smart-ass
I guess my point is that innovation now mostly lies in technology rather than game play, perhaps because games are becoming more and more expensive to produce. Wouldn’t there be a market for games targetting older hardware that innovate more in the gameplay department, trading the higher production costs of technologically cutting edge games for the (perhaps) increased risk of being different and innovative in gameplay?
After all, isn’t Crysis ‘just’ a very pretty shooter? Might something like Crysis be a sign that we’re up for something new?
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but personally I’m rather getting bored with shooters that are just becoming more pretty but are otherwise of a tiring formula.
The formula has barely changed since Doom. There have been some embellishments like Half-Life’s story-based stuff with a few variations on the same basic set of weaponry and a few odds and sods, but mostly no innovation in gameplay at all. Sadly I haven’t played Portal yet but I suspect that’s about it for true innovation in the first person category.
Cas
Oh shush. Halo added smart allies and seamless vehicle control. Halo 2 added dual wielding and further refined the “holy trinity” of gun/melee/grenades. Undying and Jedi Knight added a whole heap of additional powers and spells designed to be used at the same time as conventional weaponry. Half Life discarded the traditional cutscenes and intergrated them seamlessly into the gameplay. BioShock gives you a whole world to play in with loads of ways of disposing (or avoiding) your foes, as well as forcing you to make awkward moral choices. Metroid managed to intergrate traditional platform elements and a variety of visors to suit every occasion and keep you on your toes. Deus Ex added upgradable weapons, non-reversable character upgrades and abilities and a ridiculously interactive world. Theif added all sorts of stealth elements and ways to complete levels without even touching a single opponent.
Theres been a whole heap of new ideas and inovations for FPS games, and those are just the major ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Redfaction - deformable levels ;D
AvP - frightening? atmospheric lighting?
It’s fair to say most 1st person shooters have 1 or 2 USPs.
If evolution of features is how a particular game genre evolves, then I’d say RTSs have evolved far less than FPSs.
What gameplay feature does C&C3(2007) have that Starcraft(1998) didn’t?
shroud - check,
fog of war - check,
super-weapons - check,
unique units - check,
unit special abilities - check,
reliable path finding - check,
tunneling units - check,
solo missions - check,
air/ground distinction - check,
cargo units - check,
garrisonable structures, check,
I’m realy struggling to find any innovations in the last decade! :o