Despite its history as a PC game studio, Crytek President Cevat Yerli has said his company will be moving to console development for its future releases.
In an interview with Croatian gaming site PC Player, Yerli cited rampant piracy of PC games and the significantly higher sales potential of console platforms as the main reasons behind the move away from exclusive PC development. “We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable,” he said. “I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming, piracy. To the degree PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform.”
“Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more,” he continued. “It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in the future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.”
However, Yerli added that the focus on consoles would not start with Crysis, which he confirmed could not be made to run on consoles in its current state. “Crysis as we have seen is impossible,” he said. “Crysis would have to be largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Crysis is designed to be PC exclusive. Our internal focus is not linked to bring Crysis to consoles.”
He was also ambivalent about Crytek’s support for Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service, despite the fact that Crysis was released as part of the Games for Windows initiative. He said the Games for Windows Live SDKs came too late for inclusion in Crysis, and added, “Whether we support it in the future will be a business decision though and nothing has been decided.”
Crytek broke onto the PC gaming scene in 2004 with the hit FPS Far Cry, which featured a highly advanced graphics engine, large, transition-free levels and comparatively open-ended gameplay. Crysis, released in November 2007, offers similar gameplay in a different setting, with numerous technological improvements including support for DirectX 10.
The full interview with Crytek’s Cevat Yerli is available at pcplay.hr.
