Crytek, the developer best known for their work on the original Far Cry, the Crysis series, and most recently Ryse: Son of Rome, has reportedly hit significant financial difficulties having resulted in many staff members not being paid on time, and the cancellation of the hotly anticipated Ryse 2. While a pre-production deal for Ryse 2 was apparently set, Microsoft wanted to take over the intellectual property rights to the franchise in exchange for funding development.
These days, independent developers tend to want retain their IP’s, as has been seen with Bungie’s post-Halo work with Destiny and Respawn’s recent development on Titanfall.
Additionally, the current culture within the company has been described as “a tense, unstable environment, plagued by poor communication,” which has been corroborated by the departure of many high level staffers. As a result, many in the studio have claimed that salaries for April and May have yet to have been paid, leaving much of the staff understandably demoralized and upset as a result of their financial plight.
It has gotten to the point where local authorities have had to step in to force Crytek Shanghai to pay staff social insurance, with members of the staff considering suing Crytek for breach of contract. Not only has Crytek declined to comment on the current situation, but they have outright denied any significant financial difficulties on their part. Leading many to speculate exactly what is going wrong at Crytek.
Possible reasons for Crytek’s untimely demise include its failed ventures into the free-to-play market, with the shooter Warface having flopped everywhere except for Russia. The strategy card game The Collectables has also failed to generate a significant amount of revenue despite having over half a million downloads worldwide.
Another major element of failure on Crytek’s part is their Crytek engine, which is suffering greatly against the competition of the more prominent Unity Engine and Epic’s Unreal Engine despite being a technically sound engine.
Right now, the only major project in Crytek’s pipeline is Homefront: The Revolution, a follow-up to THQ’s Homefront, that was sold off at auction for $500,000 when THQ dissolved last year.The game is being co-published by Deep Silver, and is considered one of the last hopes that Crytek has to survive in the foreseeable future.
We will update you with more information as it is released.
Source: Kotaku
Source: Eurogamer
Daniel Horowitz
@horowitzcentral
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