Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli has expanded his company out from just making AAA titles to the recent free-to-play title Warface. Yerli sees that as a reflection of a shift in the industry towards “social” trends.
“I think one of the key words for the next generation gaming will be ‘social’. My perspective of next generation gaming is that playing with friends, and playing on multiple devices and having complimentary experiences with them, will be a big part of the process,” said Yerli. “I think, generally, people are playing shorter cycles in games, and session-based games are going to be key. I think, ultimately, the word ‘online’ will be extended to embrace ‘social’ as well.”
Yerli also noted that Warface is part of his company’s efforts to make free-to-play titles more like AAA experiences, saying, “In the past, free-to-play has been perceived as cheap games with low production values. For us, it has always been about an opportunity to transform and change the industry status quo, and we want to develop the most user friendly business model and make no compromise on the quality either.”
“So, with Warface, we’ll launch what we call a AAA for free experience, which is high quality gaming for free. And we think that the learning curve to achieve that as a games service, having something that doesn’t compromise on quality but is free to play, has been quite a steep one,†he added. “Also, at the same time, as I mentioned before, there’s a social aspect of it – so it not only has to be quality and free-to-play, but social as well.”
Speaking of the future, Yerli sees huge potential in what cloud gaming will do soon. “I think true cloud gaming with a complete streaming experience will become possible once we have tripled our available bandwidths at home. By that I mean, if you can get a solid 20-40MB connection then you’re going to get a real connection of 3MB,” he explained. “That is not available yet in the U.S. or the majority of Europe, so I think it’s going to take another 3-4 years.”
“So maybe in around 2014-2016 I believe cloud gaming can become ‘true’, but it will always be under pressure from local-based client games, since all the computation power on the client side also increases,” he concluded.
Source: VG247
