Well the graphics in your game are amazing... i'll give them that.

But the singleplayer is weak, and the multiplayer suffers from jerkyness and lack of players.

All and all a pretty second rate game saved from mediocrety by an amazing engine.

But then no one can run it. Sure you issued a demo, but people can't know for sure wheter the game will run or not until they reach the ice bits, which kills all known pc's. Why should somone fork down money for a game that they probably won't be able to play...

I didn'nt pirate the game, because i knew it wouldn't run. I played the SP demo and wasn't impressed (by the game or my rigs dire performance). I was in on the MP beta and had great fun, but knew it could never happen in the final game (not enough players, players left being uber skilled, rig wasn't up to it).
Maybe in a year i'll buy it... but only maybe.

So how the hell do you expect averge Joe Pc Gamer to buy it when a hardcore PC Gamer like me won't touch with a long pole...

This is what happens when developers get too lofty, with their technical ambitions. Its cool if your game has decent substance, but Crysis, while looking cool, was to heavily based in what if tech, to work for many people.

PC Piracy recently was blamed for the demise of the Titan Quest developers, only difference is that Titan Quest was perhaps a better and more pirated game.

Getting onto consoles is the only way to make money these days, and have your work seen and appreciated, while putting piracy on a lesser back burner. Hopefully the console versions of Crysis may have a positive effect on the developers. Or maybe they should look at doing something else for console.

*shrugs

I could afford the game, if I wanted...its the PC I'd need to run it on that I can't justify.

The price of PC games is horrendous, that has a lot to do with it, and consoles are even worse. I avoid consoles because I can buy old games for the PC at a far cheaper price, like Far Cry, and eventually Crysis, maybe.

But some developers seem to want to kill the PC market more. Requiring you to do complex time consuming installs and then swap in a disk every time you try to run a game, you might as well buy a console and put a disk in. Let alone all the install disk, finish installing rest of game over slow modem, always connected to play unless you do a special offline procedure (that should be automatic) that may fail, and special backup procedures. Rubbish, buy a console.

What's the solution, obvious, have a hardware copy protection mechanism for the PC like they do for the consoles. Have boot from disk too, with open API's like Open GL, and universal drivers (couple of open-source projects on that too). Diminish piracy that way. If a developer wishes to use it they can, if they don't they don't have to.

To make it more fair, the main game developers organisations can be responsible, along with firmware, chip-set and Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive manufacturers if needed. So any OS can use the service. If needed implement the encryption layer and separate unique media disk on drives.

Piracy is not really the reason for high prices is it. Think about it, how many more copies do they sell on consoles because of a lack of piracy, yet they cost even more (maybe pirates act as real competition on the PC :( ). Hasn't it got more to do with greed and spending development money to be the best.