In an interview with IGN, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli revealed that the newly announced CryEngine 3 will not only allow developers to make games for PS3 and Xbox 360, but begin development on titles for the next generation of consoles.

"I think as soon as the next consoles ship we’ll have at some point a future iteration of the engine to take advantage of that, but what we are saying now is effectively if you want to make a next-gen game, you can start doing that with the engine," said Yerli.

Yerli further discussed how when a new line of consoles launch, CGI trailers and target renders are a plenty, and gamers soon find that games are graphically similar to 4th-5th generation games on the old consoles. Not so with CryEngine 3.

"Every time a new generation of consoles come, people think it’ll look like five to 10 times better than the previous generation, but once the games ship we realize there’s actually not that much difference," he said. "The only remaining part is as soon as that platform becomes available, the detailed nuts and bolts, we’ll be ready like this [snaps]."

Judging from the recent CryEngine 3 tech demos, it looks like Epic Games and the Unreal Engine have some real competition. According to Yerli, almost all of the top 20 developers have shown great interest in CryEngine 3.

"We were surprised by what kind of people wanted to look at the engine because it’s attention we’ve never gotten before like this, and it must be the consoles that caused that," Yerli said.