Crytek Plans To Transition ‘Entirely’ To Free-To-Play

Crytek previously mentioned that it was interested in aggressively pursuing the ever popular free-to-play business model, and it seems the developer wasn’t kidding around.

Speaking with Venture Beat, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said that the studio plans to transition “entirely” to the free-to-play within the next five years. Yerli also reiterated previous comments, saying that the company wants to “marry” the quality of AAA games with the free-to-play model.

The studio already has at least one AAA-quality free-to-play game in the works: a first-person-shooter called Warface. A closed beta for the game went live last month.

“I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface,” Yerli said.

That doesn’t mean that we won’t see any more retail products after Crysis 3. Yerli explains that several are still in development.

“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.”

Part of Crytek’s strategy to break into the free-to-play market is “G-Face,” the company’s own digital distribution service for its future free-to-play titles such as Warface. Additionally, Crytek will be opening up the service to any third-party developers who are interested.

“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,” said Yerli. “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.”