Revealing they've been up to some plucky research on the whole Cloud thing, Crytek reckon will only see the true potential in about 4/5 years time.
Right now it's still "beyond the technology we have" says the dev, higher bandwidths and better infrastructure is needed. Crysis was demoed through OnLive, but there's no collaboration.
"We had our research in 2005 on this subject but we stopped around 2007 because we had doubts about economics of scale. But that was at a time when bandwidth was more expensive," CEO Cevat Yerli tells GamesIndustry.biz.
"We saw that by 2013 - 2015 with the development of bandwidths and household connections worldwide that it might become more viable then." Recently here in the UK, Virgin Media has just launched a 50MB broadband service but it's still only available in certain parts of the British Isles.
"It doesn't take a lot to make a video-based renderer, but what you need is the right infrastructure that is beyond the technology we have, it's more like cable net providers and communication networks."
"They have to provide fast bandwidths and connectivity in order to allow such technology to excel. So as it was dependent on somebody else, we decided to wait," he explained.
"It will be interesting to see how it happens under millions of users. Let's say more than a few hundred users, how it will behave." While EA maybe a partner with OnLive, Crytek itself has no direct links with the company behind the Cloud-platform. "We're not involved, we just allowed Crysis to be tested on it," Yerli stated. Looks like another console generation isn't so farfetched after all.