North America and Europe welcome Warface on PC today, a big step for a game that is itself a big step for its developer, Crytek. Warface is the company's first free-to-play game, the first step in a planned journey that culminates in the Crysis and Ryse studio going fully free-to-play within five years.

At the recent DICE Europe conference, CEO Cevat Yerli spoke about closing the visual gap between cinema and games, and how Crytek is using advanced lighting and modeling effects to make Xbox One historical adventure Ryse stand out. Afterwards, I asked Yerli about the difficulties in marrying F2P with the studio's reputation for high-end graphics.

"It's just a matter of time," Yerli said. "We already introduced with Warfare a much higher quality relative to the current generation of gaming, and Ryse is [our] first game that launches a next-generation experience. Going forward, I expect free-to-play games to catch up with next-generation offerings as well. So it's really just a matter of time."