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The future of consoles will be free-to-play and away from boxed retail, Crytek’s CEO has claimed.
Speaking to CVG, Cevat Yerli said however that console manufacturers were being held back from introducing the payment model on a large scale due to pressure from retailers for boxed products.
“Hardware manufacturers are reliant on distribution and retail businesses, and those companies who are not reliant on third-party retail business such as Apple can go 100% digital,” said Yerli.
“They don’t have the problem of retailers saying, ‘I will not sell your hardware if you do not give me boxed games too’. That is the culprit of the problem.
“Apple says, ‘screw you, if you don’t sell my hardware I will sell it anyway in my own stores’. So really the number one issue that needs to be resolved is how companies like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo become independent from retail so that they can go fully digital.”
Yerli added that the next-generation of tablets would be close in power and capability to current-generation consoles, so manufacturers would have to ship new systems soon and adapt to the market or face an uncertain future.
"I’ve believed for about a year now that as soon as tablets can stream on to TVs, then there’s no reason why you should buy a console anymore,” he said.
“We’re still pushing the tablet game market ourselves, and you’ll see both casual and hardcore titles from us.”
Yerli recently announced Crytek’s intentions to become a free-to-play only studio after its currently in-development boxed titles had been completed.
The studio’s first F2P game, self-titled "triple-A" PC online multiplayer shooter Warface, currently has more than one million registered users in Russia.
