Piracy has been blamed for just about everything: bad reviews, poor sales to even shifts in business models. Crytek has been the most vocal, blaming piracy to be the cause of lower-than-expected sales of Crysis.

However, Penumbra game writer Tom Jubert disagrees, saying that piracy can no longer be employed as he “catch-all excuse”.

To back up his argument, Jubert cites figures from GameShadow Metrics, saying that the Crysis piracy factor is 1:5 instead of Crytek CEO claiming that for every one licensed copy of Crysis there were twenty pirated copies. He also notes that there is a 3:7 ratio in the UK.

“Of course, that’s not to say that Yerli is wrong,” concedes Jubert, “[it's] only that 1:15 is a potentially misleading statistic.” He also notes that it is difficult to measure the actual number of high-end gaming PCs in use, so claims like “consoles sell more” are equally unfounded.