Frankfurt, Germany-based Crytek is embarking on a new journey called "console development." Engine business manager Harald Seeley shares his thoughts on console hardware, the state of PC gaming and the always-controversial subject of piracy.

What was the business reasoning behind releasing PC-exclusive games? Even if piracy has driven you away from PC exclusives, doesn’t it make more sense anyway to go multiplatform to mitigate development costs?

While it generally can make reasonable financial sense to release a game across multiple platforms, it is also obviously important that the game is a good fit to the platform, both technically and in the sense of being designed to appeal to the right audience. However, until our engine technology was fully in place to support a cross platform production such a step wasn’t really possible. Besides the cost of developing this technology, there are also the hidden extra costs of designing optimal assets and levels which work well on all platforms. So that’s one reason why it’s taken a while for us to make the decision to go in this direction.

Why the affinity for the PC platform? If you had to choose one platform to develop for would it be the PC as opposed to a console?

When our company was founded, we were completely unknown to the rest of the world, and therefore did not have ready access to the resources needed to work on proprietary platforms. The PC platform was more inviting, as it was both an open platform and the most technically advanced. This allowed us to have easy access to the development tools we needed, while the PC’s clear technological advantages gave us the opportunity to set new visual standards with our first game. However, console technology has advanced a great deal since we released Far Cry, and our teams have since found it very exciting to push the boundaries of what most people today consider possible to do on those platforms, both technically and artistically.

What’s your opinion of the current generation of consoles, and do you find that Xbox 360 and PS3 development is comparable to PC’s development environment? Do you find PS3 as complicated to work with as some developers say?

Each platform brings with it certain advantages and certain limitations. A lack of a universally available mass storage device on one platform is offset by the simplicity of its unified memory architecture. Multiple cores on another platform may open up more programming possibilities, but that is offset by the increased complexity of designing the code architecture. In all cases, the limited memory available forces us to be very creative in our approaches. But our R&D team thrives on such challenges, and the personal satisfaction one receives when finding a new solution to a problem is often dependent on how difficult it was to achieve the result in the first place.