Crytek is intent on shaking up the current FPS paradigm by transitioning entirely to a free-to-play (F2P) business model in two-to-five years.
According to Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, Warface is the company’s first free-to-play shooter and remains on track to launch by the end of 2013.
“We decided five or six years ago that we want to marry the quality of triple-A games with the business model of free-to-play. And at that time, we decided some other games, in some of our other studios, would head in this direction,” Yerli told VentureBeat.
“But we kept pushing the quality bar higher on our console business, which is the main dominating business for the Western world, but we are observing, plainly – and we see this already with Warface – that the free-to-play market is on the rise. I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface.”
According to Yerli, Crytek is currently focused on F2P for the PC market, but ultimately plans on expanding its philosophy to next-gen consoles.
“We’re looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans,” he said.
“So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles. But our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that.”
There are clearly a number of changes afoot at Crytek, as company producer Michael Elliot Read also recently confirmed that the wildly successful Crysis franchise may no longer be confined to an FPS format.
“I think in terms of the universe, we have a lot more life left in that to go back and try some unique stuff. Whether it’s FPS or not I have no idea, but there’s definitely a future in the franchise,” Read told Dusty Dusty Cartridge.
“You know, I think at this point I don’t want to give anything away. But I think the Crysis franchise itself has life left in it. Whether it’s in a different game type format, whether it’s expanding upon this, it’s hard to say. That’s going to be up to the designers at the end of the day.”
According to Read, Crysis was “always” intended to be be a trilogy.
“I think that over that time we’ve built a really cool universe. We haven’t really gone in and said ‘Hey let’s put Nano suits and clown suits and stuff and completely violate and sell our IP… [I think] we’ve done a fairly good job at maintaining that,” he added.
Crysis is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts. The first game of the franchise hit store shelves in November 2007, with Crysis 3 slated to go live in Spring 2013.
