Crytek's in Serious Trouble?

The studio that brought us Far Cry, Crysis and Ryse: Son of Rome is apparently in serious trouble. The company is having trouble paying their employees, as a result of some of their projects falling short of financial expectations. This has led to reports of bad work environments in Crytek's studios, developers leaving the studio, and prototype projects (including a sequel to Ryse) being cancelled. While the studio is obviously denying the reports, we've seen this happen before to companies such as THQ.

While I'm not a big fan of Crytek's work, this could potentially become a serious situation for the PC gaming market. Moreover, if the company goes kaput, devs relying on the CryEngine for game development (such as Star Citizen) might have trouble getting support. What are your thoughts about Crytek's situation at the moment?

Here's an article further discussing this situation.

Thread's almost a day late compared to my other forum of choice.

Analysis seems the standard "bit off more than they could chew" story. In their case, they expanded too fast without a solid underlying business model (or one that was solid in theory, but they can't get devs to use Cryengine).

To me, it seems like Crytek grew too fast and didn't really take time to really think through its actions.

So ultimately they kinda got screwed by EA (too the extent that EA never really promoted Crysis as much as their own franchises like Battlefield, Mass Effect or NFS) so they hook up with Microsoft for Ryse. Now apparently Ryse did OK, but they burnt their bridges with Microsoft for some reason too. Now, they've 2 F 2 P games (some Dota clone and Hunt), the new Homefront and other contract work.

Ya know, I don't think Crytek is going to burnout and explode into bankruptcy, but they're going to have to downsize significantly.

I've heard about this from a World of Tanks site. Wargaming, the creator of World of Tanks is rumored to be purchasing Crytek.

I don't follow engine news very much, and I no longer play Crytek games since they're published by Ubisoft, whose official stance on PC gamers is "you're all thieves".

Regarding developers and Crytek. I'll say this.

At the indie level, their subscription option is lacking, which is all the more a problem when Epic (the Unreal guys) and Unity have far more compelling options and have basically taken your user base. I can't help but feel that they they treat Indies has to be signifying of how they treat their AAA licenses (AKA they don't really seem to care about them.)

Most Cry Engine games not made by Crytek seem to be lacking for this reason it seems, because nobody big wants to adopt the engine when Crytek seems so passive (Star Citizen is a train wreck in the making, Sonic Boom justs looks like ass, which is a pretty big problem for a Cry Engine showcase, etc.)

Basiaclly, once the other engines were able to close the graphics gap, people started shifting to engines with better scripting systems (Unreal 4 and Unity) and they kinda started hemoraging their user base.

Ubisoft has never published for Crytek dude. Crytek is doing all their own publishing now, except for Homefront: The Revolution through Deep Silver.

It would have helped if EA had allowed Steam to sell Crysis 3 and split the profits. They would have had more publicity and exposure.

Star Citizen in trouble? What do you mean? Last I heard everyone was singing song and praise regarding the game's lofty ambitions.

I think it's because if Crytek takes a hit, they'll be less able to support the developers using their engine. Which means if the inevitable flaw strikes Star Citizen, they might not be able to fix it. Train wreck.

My problem with Star Citizen is that is looks far too ambitious in all honesty. For all the money that's been poured in and for all the praise the all singing, all dancing crap of the world have given it, not much progress has been made. Seriously, we've already had similar games like Elite: Dangerous make serious progress in the same amount of time Star Citizen has done.... Well not much at all tbh.

Calling it right now, Star Citizen will be the next Duke Nukem Forever. Yeah it will come out, but it will probably end up being a steaming hunk of ass.

Far Cry is an Ubisoft game. I'm looking at the disks themselves.

It's also the only one I ever bought because I never had the system for the Crysis series, and I heard Far Cry 2 was terrible. I started boycotting Ubisoft after the first two Assassin's Creed games.

edited 25th Jun '14 10:50:32 AM by Rotpar

Yeah but Crytek created the first game in the Far Cry series. It is just that Ubisoft has the rights to the series but Crytek was just the developer.