Large gaming news and review site IGN has recently visited Crytek’s Budapest studio, where the new installment in the Crysis franchise, Warhead, is currently under development. During this trip, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli answered questions of IGN regarding Warhead, and the company’s future as a PC developer.

The Interview
Below are fragments taken from the interview, of which the full version can be found here.

IGN: How well did Crysis do?

Cevat Yerli: Well, commercially, we had hopes that were not met. But the real expectations were actually met. As a developer we made a profit, so we’re happy. Critically, we achieved goals. The [reviews] were slightly under the critique-level that we wanted to have, but that’s life. We may have failed a little here and there, but overall Crysis I would say it didn’t do excellent, but it did good.

IGN: There are different approaches to online verification, server-side stuff like EA’s. Are you looking at that or thinking about that?

Cevat Yerli: Effectively, if the game isn’t an online game or multiplayer game--there are challenges regardless of what you do--the game can be cracked. The effort is to make it more difficult to crack, and certainly we’re going to make it more difficult this time with Warhead.

But at the end of the day, I think our message is if you’re a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating. We will see less and less games appearing on the PC, or less and less games pushing the boundaries of PC gaming. Or, in other words, speaking in terms of PC exclusivity, we would only consider full PC exclusives--if the situation continues like this or gets worse--I think we would only consider PC exclusive titles that are either online or multiplayer and no more single-player.

IGN: With Crysis do you think that you revealed too much of the game too soon?

Cevat Yerli: Oh yeah, with Crysis for sure. There were two issues there. First, we were supposed to come out earlier, but we screwed that up. And we communicated towards a plan, but even then I think we were probably six to eight months too early. I think that broke our necks to some degree because I heard in a lot of reviews, or people when they talked about it, that they already had seen it two years ago or they had their hands-on already two years ago, but I remember their eyes when they saw it for the first time. They were blown away by it. But by the time they saw it four or five times, they were already, let’s say, used up with it. The first impact effect was missing, and hence I think a lot of reviews didn’t look over that fact.

A lot of reviews did not rate it as if they had not played it for the first time, and across the industry they didn’t rate it at that level. They were rating it more like a checkbox ticking. "Okay, two years ago, we have seen this, we wrote this, let’s see what they did." I think this was an issue for us. We revealed too much of the mission, we revealed almost everything of the game previous to release, and I think that was a big mistake certainly not to be repeated ever again.

IGN: You haven’t talked about multiplayer for Warhead. Is there anything planned?

Cevat Yerli: Yes, there are multiplayer plans, and I think you will see our strategy being consistent with Warhead’s strategy in terms as it was for Crysis. There was critique around Crysis in terms of the play modes, and we will feature play modes in Warhead that are positioned also toward something that is not one extreme which is too simple, or the other extreme. We will address it carefully, but we will tell more about multiplayer at another time.

IGN: You’re going to be one of the few PC exclusive games--the big ones--this year. A lot of PC games are multiplatform now.

Cevat Yerli: There’s a lot of critique about this decision, "Why don’t we just go for console?" And yes, it could be done; it could be done pretty straightforward. But I still want to have Crysis on the PC; the dominant platform should be PC. And Crysis should be on PC. This is a philosophical decision here. We’ll see how it holds up here, and we see if our exclusivity is not rewarded, it will have consequences.

Entire Interview:  here.