Crytek's "primary goal" is to "transition entirely" to developing AAA games that are free-to-play, CEO Cevat Yerli told VentureBeat in a recent interview.
Yerli said the timeline for the transition is contingent on how technology in the free-to-play market evolves in the coming years, although he is unsure if Crytek would make the move in two or even five years.
"So we have quite a few console titles in our pipeline that are [traditional retail games] while we investigate free-to-play on consoles," Yerli said. "But our primary goal is to make AAA free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that."
Yerli said that its GFace social platform and upcoming shooter Warface were developed from with idea of combining console-quality AAA games with the free-to-play business model.
"We kept pushing the quality bar higher on our console business, which is the main dominating business for the Western world, but we are observing, plainly — and we see this already with Warface — that the free-to-play market is on the rise," he said. "I think over the next two to three years, free-to-play is going to rival retail with quality games like Warface.
"We're looking at free-to-play as a force that drives our growth and world-domination plans," he added.
Warface is currently in closed beta for Windows PC. Last summer Yerli expressed similar sentiments regarding Crytek's future, stating the company would begin to focus solely on its free-to-play efforts.