Crytek expects to "transition entirely" to free-to-play within five years

Crytek boss Cevat Yerli expects the firm to "transition entirely" to free-to-play within five years.

Speaking with Venture Beat, Yerli said the firm decided a few years back it wanted to "marry the quality of triple-A games," with free-to-play, and the quality of games available through the business model will only get better.

"I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface," he said. "We're looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans. So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles.'

The firm's "world-domination plans" also include its G-Face service, which Crytek's shooter, Warface will launch on by the end of the year.

"Our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that. As a company, [we will] transition from a developer to a service company, and we're going to offer a platform, with G-Face, to any other [developer that needs it].

"If we could launch our games on a platform that already exists today, and we could get the same results, then we wouldn't build our own platform. But we're convinced that our platform does some particularly new things that makes our games behave better. That's why we plan to offer this service to third parties.

"This doesn't mean our main business will be driven by our platform business. We are just going to open it up and see how it works. We are always going to be a games-first company. We will always have our own development because we are all about making games. We provide technology, but technology is not our main driver. We make technology to make great games."

Crytek's Crysis 3 is out on February 19 in North America and on February 22 in Europe for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Thanks, GI International.