Wednesday, December 14th 2016
Crytek's Woes Not Finished - Renowned Developer Not Paying Wages Again
Renowned games studio Crytek hasn't left the ropes yet - and the situation is again looking dire for the company. After a rough 2014 that saw multiple upcoming games being canceled (with a sequel to the graphical masterpiece Ryse being canned at this time) and employees not getting paid for months at a time, only the sale of franchises and assets (Homefront's IP to Deep Silver, for one), as well as a licensing deal with Amazon for their Crytek engine (worth $70 million), managed to save the company. At the time, employees put the blame on less than solid management decisions towards pushing the company as a free-to-play powerhouse, blaming the management for poor handling of the studio's transition towards that form of monetization. However, efforts to stay afloat seem to have been little more than a small lifeboat for the company.
Recently, reports from inside the studio guarantee that wages are not being paid properly again, with salaries over the course of 2016 having been delayed several months or not paid at all. According to Kotaku, staff in Crytek's main office in Frankfurt, Germany have not received checks in nearly three months. And apparently, Crytek management informed the staff last Friday that the company was trying to secure funding from various sources- through loans and perhaps asset sales - but had not yet succeeded. People from Crytek's other studios in Budapest and Sofia have also reported missing payments, while Crytek's Glassdoor is full of complaints about the company not paying staff on time.
Recently, the company released two high-quality, VR-centric games in "Robinson: The Journey" and "The Climb", with copious amounts of the studios' liquidity flowing to these two projects. I can't certainly be called an expert in this matters, and I clearly don't have the full picture for why and how these decisions were made; that said, I do find it disconcerting that a studio would put so many resources behind two games developed for a frankly immature ecosystem, where the user base isn't, apparently, capable of absorbing this kind of releases in volume enough to generate tidy profits. Jumping into the VR bandwagon so soon and so deeply may have been another crucial misstep for the company's management, akin to the free-to-play blunder that landed the company in trouble in 2014. I hope the signs aren't definite, and I hope that I'm wrong, because if there ever was a studio focused on pushing the boundaries of graphics and their game design, it's Crytek.
Source:
Kotaku
45 Comments on Crytek's Woes Not Finished - Renowned Developer Not Paying Wages Again
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games if this chart is correct (version 4 specifically), it's fairly safe to assume evolve & everybody's gone to the rapture had no real issues with the engine, they launched on multiple platforms, they werent broken
just stop crytek just stop
and it was a turd from launch
once they have the engine, they have it! it doesnt matter if crytek shuts down or doesnt answer their emails, they are not required to talk to the company at all, they have the source code of a whole enginethat's funny, yesterday i was on an article about famous celebrities (musicians/actors/etc) that are homeless
why do past hits matter? the games cost millions to make, so they need high price sales to pay that off... but then how will you fund the next project? with every release is the chance of failure... when bizarre launched their last game, activision shut the entire studio down since there was no new project even though that studio is one of the most highly regarded ones, EA did similar when they shut down the saboteur devs on the day of its launch while it had a bug that crashed for anyone NOT using crossfire (eventually fixed in a 'beta' patch a few days later)i tried warface for a few hours, really started enjoying it but it could be better if it felt better, there are also some sort of long term fans for it & it keeps getting free content updates
do you have some kind of vendetta against f2p? isnt warface one of the most successful games? i'm not going to blindly blame a format for anything, good games come in free/paid/subscription formats the same as bad games, management & marketing also have an effect
basically saying, successful celebs have gone homeless the same way successful (or well received) game studios have failed
In point of fact, they merely licensed their Cryengine game engine. No involvement. So no, not semantics. You can't say Crytek is part of SC troubles. The closes tyou can come is the game engine used (Cryengine), without any involvement by Crytek.
and the whole gface platform is just plain crap ulgy clunky didn't work very well when it worked
in short NOPE
The grass is always greener on the other side ;)
Makes more free to play games.
Still can't afford to pay wages.
Who could have guessed? :)
They will still keep their Frankfurt and Kiev studios running though.
www.dsogaming.com/news/crytek-closes-development-studios-will-refocus-on-its-core-strengths-of-developing-innovative-games/