The gaming industry’s landscape has changed drastically in the last five years, and with the advent of indie gaming and the rise in popularity of mobile gaming, mainline developers that produce AAA games have been getting more and more threatened by the day, the most recent example being THQ closing shop and deciding to sell all its assets.
However, Crysis 3 producer Michael Read believes that despite this changing scenario, Crytek won’t be shutting down anytime soon thanks to the multiple successful projects it has underway.
“There is a clear shift that is coming in the industry and there is a lot of pessimism amongst some people,” Read said in an interview with Digitally Downloaded. “I am fairly optimistic about where things are going and how we as a company is going to continue to grow. People think of Crytek and think ‘oh, they only thing I know about you guys is that you do Crysis’.”
“And when I came into the company there is all these other products at Crytek, from our engine technology to all the different projects we have underway and in licensing our technology as well,” he continued. “We do not just think about today but we think about the innovation of where we need to go tomorrow as well and we are learning a lot of things from our own in-house projects as well as our licensing partners that help build the engine up.
“We have deals with lots of other publishers out there. We are well poised for an independent company of 800 people, even given some of the interesting stuff happening in the industry.”
Considering that the CryEngine is probably one of the most actively used and one of the most important gaming engines on the market right now, along with Unreal Engine 3 and Frostbite 2 and a few others, that itself should be enough to keep Crytek more than afloat for a long time from now.
When asked about the future of the Crysis franchise, Read said: “I think over the last five years we have built up a strong and identifiable franchise, especially in the FPS area. We are now talking about what we can do in taking the Crysis franchise into a new space and do something different outside of the story we have been telling with this trilogy.”
A little time back, that in the future, Crysis could traverse beyond the realsm of the FPS genre. Check out the full story here.
