Crytek’s Gface to be an open platform

Cloud gaming and social service Gface won’t just feature Crytek titles, Cevat Yerli has said.

Gface is Crytek’s bid to get away from traditional publishers like long-time partner THQ, which is currently fighting for survival, by entering the cloud gaming market and pushing "triple-A core free-to-play games".

The service entered beta at the beginning of February 2012.

In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun in which he detailed Crytek’s free-to-play strategy, company CEO Cervat Yerli also confirmed that Gface would be opened up to third-party developers.

"The first phase of Gface is Crytek-developed games, but then we’re going to publish F2P games from other developers," he said.

"And then, in the second phase of Gface, we’re going to open up the platform so that people can just publish games themselves into Gface."

Though Yerli claimed Gface will be a "completely open platform," he did say there would be a minimal ammount of curation.

"It’s more like Facebook or the iOS App Store," said Yerli.

"There’s lots of freedom, but it’s curated to some degree. The curation’s very lightweight."

This doesn’t mean however that Crytek isn’t going to have a closer relationship with some developers than others.

"There are going to be premium partners and game developers with whom we’ll have a close relationship," says Yerli.

"But the idea is to give everyone access to real-time social networking for their games. That’s the angle I want to try: how do you make gaming for you and your friends easier and more productive?"