Crytek: ‘Sony & Microsoft in for a tough time unless they support F2P’

Cevat Yerli’s big adventure on convincing everyone that free-to-play is in fact the future continues, after the previous episodes (Crytek is excited to go completely free-to-play, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo against F2P and Crytek confident on making free-to-play work). Now, Crytek’s founder told Eurogamer that unless Sony and Microsoft support free-to-play titles, they will have a really bad time.

“I hope for them that they do. If they don’t then it’s going to be a tough time for them. It’s quite a challenge for those companies logically because they rely so heavily on retail to sell the hardware and to sell the games where the margin for retail really is.”

“If they would forgo their entire retail business and go digital free-to-play, then they would not be selling any more Xboxes as well. There’s a chicken and egg thing there. And they have to make radical calls.”

Yerli isn’t all about love for free-to-play tough; he mentions how this model is often seen as a rotten egg, filled with bad quality games – “it’s pay to win, it’s low quality”. We add that some of those games try to milk their players and use their cash shops to sell overpriced items that only last a few hours before shutting down and moving on to the next clone.

He adds that Crytek is trying to change the way F2P looks, by creating high quality games. Warface, for example: “It’s CryEngine 3, it’s a big investment.”