Electronic Arts to make “Crysis Warhead Performance PC”

An EA representative, at the company’s Comic-Con booth today, said that EA plans to market pre-built PCs in concurrence with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead. The idea seems to be to target some of the gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and restore confidence in them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

The idea of Electronic Arts looking for ways to make the PC platform more approachable is great, and this idea is sound–buy this PC that says Crysis on it; it’s designed to run Crysis, and you know that if it plays Crysis it’ll play anything else on the market. I was also impressed that EA had no less than three PC exclusives–Crysis Warhead, BattleForge, and Warhammer Online, and other games on display like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space are in development for PC as well–in its booth at Comic-Con, a mainstream show if there ever was one.

Apparently, the rigs will come in various configurations, which will correspond to Crysis Warhead’s levels of graphical detail, with a likely price range being $600-$800 (I doubt EA will want to market a machine that meets only the game’s minimum spec), and they will probably be named accordingly–the Crysis Warhead Performance PC, and so on.

The representative also mentioned to me, EA’s own internal analysis indicates the PC market is growing–publishers just have to learn how to capitalize on it