Cevat Yerli of Crytek thinks the future of consoles is free-to-play, but he has described the reasons why that is hard for hardware manufacturers like Sony and Microsoft to implement. He said that the main reason why they are held back is due to being reliant on retail.
“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. 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,” he revealed in an interview with CVG.
He mentioned that there are ways Apple does not have to deal with all this because they can simply sell through their own stores.
“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,” he said.
“That is the biggest issue in the industry right now, because any change implies pressure from retail.”