Crytek may go bankrupt


What we still didn't know from there:

Two people close to the studio said February's salary had been delayed to April, half of March's salary was paid in late April, and salary for April and May have still not been paid - leaving staff demoralised and upset.

Now, local authorities are getting involved, we've been told, to force Crytek Shanghai to pay staff social insurance. Some are considering suing Crytek over breach of contract. Crytek declined to comment when contacted by Eurogamer.

Crytek Shanghai works on the company's free-to-play mobile games, offers CryEngine tech support to licensees and operates free-to-play shooter Warface in China. Around 30 people currently work there. About 10 have left because of the financial pains.

30 people to offer support on a F2P title, tech support to CryEngine licensees and develop mobile games?! Are they John Carmack's clones?

And what are they doing with the other 900 dudes?!
 
Why should 343 Industries move to CE when they already have their own proprietary engine in which they invested years and millions?
CE, but also UE, make sense if you don't have an engine of your own but AFAIK no MS 1st party studio is in this situation.

every team at MS is using different engines , some are in house and some are 3rd party like ue4.


Buy crytek , down size all but the engine guys and slowly start adopting it throughout MS and its 2nd parties .

Every tweak or feature added will ripple down to everyone. Much better than having a bunch of different engines.

This goes for any of the companies sony / Nintendo or even a third party like ubi soft. EA is doing this with frostbite , all teams have been moving to it.
 
every team at MS is using different engines , some are in house and some are 3rd party like ue4.


Buy crytek , down size all but the engine guys and slowly start adopting it throughout MS and its 2nd parties .

Every tweak or feature added will ripple down to everyone. Much better than having a bunch of different engines.

This goes for any of the companies sony / Nintendo or even a third party like ubi soft. EA is doing this with frostbite , all teams have been moving to it.

Yah, I'm not sure who would want to buy their engine business besides Microsoft, and I don't see anyone else that would buy them for the IP. I'm sure the ship will sink further before someone makes a play to buy the company and strip it for its parts.
 
I mean farcry and crysis aren't bad franchises and i'm sure they could be made better with another team working on them. But the value is all in the engine.
 
I mean farcry and crysis aren't bad franchises and i'm sure they could be made better with another team working on them. But the value is all in the engine.

I could see Microsoft buying them to own Crysis and Ryse, but have different developers work on them internally, or put new management in place at the studio that was in charge of Ryse, but keep the technical talent and artists.
 
I mean farcry and crysis aren't bad franchises and i'm sure they could be made better with another team working on them. But the value is all in the engine.

Ubisoft own the Far Cry IP. In terms of current recognisable IP, Crytek have Crysis and Ryse. Shame, I liked Crysis but have not played Ryse.
 
I could see Microsoft buying them to own Crysis and Ryse, but have different developers work on them internally, or put new management in place at the studio that was in charge of Ryse, but keep the technical talent and artists.

Is there much value in those ip's? Crysis has some value on pc, it did win the most pirated game of all time award I think twice so it's well known there but did it sell well in the console world? Maybe Crysis doesn't have as much value as we think console side. Ryse seems to be the sort of game that doesn't have the chance to strike mass appeal, and given that they canned Ryse 2 tells me that Crytek values the Ryse ip somewhat more than MS is willing to pay for it. Cryengine engine has value but then again Microsoft always has internal think tanks working on those sorts of things anyways. Plus how good is the tool side of Cryengine? I've heard it said many times in the past how one of the big appeals with Unreal is that while coders may bitch at it, the art/level/tool side seems to be very popular with the people creating the levels, art, etc. Is Cryengine just as good there? Seems like Unreal supports more platforms as well, and I presume Unity is much cheaper to license than Cryengine although maybe that has changed.
 
Is there much value in those ip's? Crysis has some value on pc, it did win the most pirated game of all time award I think twice so it's well known there but did it sell well in the console world? Maybe Crysis doesn't have as much value as we think console side. Ryse seems to be the sort of game that doesn't have the chance to strike mass appeal, and given that they canned Ryse 2 tells me that Crytek values the Ryse ip somewhat more than MS is willing to pay for it. Cryengine engine has value but then again Microsoft always has internal think tanks working on those sorts of things anyways. Plus how good is the tool side of Cryengine? I've heard it said many times in the past how one of the big appeals with Unreal is that while coders may bitch at it, the art/level/tool side seems to be very popular with the people creating the levels, art, etc. Is Cryengine just as good there? Seems like Unreal supports more platforms as well, and I presume Unity is much cheaper to license than Cryengine although maybe that has changed.

It depends what the cost of buying Crytek would be. Owning those two IPs might not be so bad. They're obviously not runaway hits, but in better hands they might make a better game out of it. Look how much better Farcry was when it was in the hands of a different developer. I'm sure someone could make a Crysis game and do a much better job of it. The name recognition still probably counts for something. Ryse's problem was that the game did not review well because of the gameplay. I'm not sure the actual concept was the fault. With better gameplay designers and more time to gestate it could have turned out to be a bigger seller.

Not saying Microsoft will buy them. I just think I could see some reasons why they might, at least more so than anyone else.
 
Buy crytek , down size all but the engine guys and slowly start adopting it throughout MS and its 2nd parties .

Why not improve the engines they have already?
What makes you think CE it's better than any MS proprietary engine?
At today the CE/Crytek has not even delivered solid 30fps on consoles so why should MS put so much money on it?

Every tweak or feature added will ripple down to everyone. Much better than having a bunch of different engines.

You assume that CE would work well for any genre/game but it might not be the case.
I yet have to see a sand-box title a la GTA or Assassin's Creed developed using CE.
What successful racing games or RPG used CE?
Platforms that used CE?

This goes for any of the companies sony / Nintendo or even a third party like ubi soft. EA is doing this with frostbite , all teams have been moving to it.

At EA they are all using FrostByte but Sony first party studios (Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games, Media Molecule, Quantic Dream, Santa Monica, etc...) all have their own engines, they are not moving to use all the same engine.
At Ubi Massive it's using it's own engine for The Division; another engine has been used for AC:Unity, another engine for Far Cry 4, another engine for Watch_Dogs and Rainbow Six and Ubi it's using Ubi Art engine for smaller projects.
Bethesda has used iD Tech and UE.
Capcom has not used MT Framework for all its games.
Square-Enix has used its own engine for FF but Crystal Dynamics and IO are using their own engines while Eidos used UE.

I don't see a "one engine to rule them all" scenario outside EA.

Edit:
I am not saying that MS can't buy CryTek or that there are no benefits but I am not convinced that it's the perfect choice.
 
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It depends what the cost of buying Crytek would be. Owning those two IPs might not be so bad. They're obviously not runaway hits, but in better hands they might make a better game out of it. Look how much better Farcry was when it was in the hands of a different developer. I'm sure someone could make a Crysis game and do a much better job of it. The name recognition still probably counts for something. Ryse's problem was that the game did not review well because of the gameplay. I'm not sure the actual concept was the fault. With better gameplay designers and more time to gestate it could have turned out to be a bigger seller.

Not saying Microsoft will buy them. I just think I could see some reasons why they might, at least more so than anyone else.

If the company your buying has 800 employees and you are only interested in 2 IP's, you wait until they go under and buy the pieces.
 
I don't see a "one engine to rule them all" scenario outside EA.

That's because EA mandated all their internal engines were replaced by Renderware when they bought Criterion, and as a result lost a lot of talented people, had virtually every game released that year delayed, and/or sub standard.

They have one engine internally now because with that mandate they not only lost all the existing internal tech, they lost the bulk of the talent they had that could build alternatives.

Dictating tech at a corporate level is stupid for a lot of reasons, make tech available, back them if they want to buy something external and give teams the freedom to make their own decisions. If teams fail because they repeatedly make poor technical decisions fire the people making those decisions......
 
If the company your buying has 800 employees and you are only interested in 2 IP's, you wait until they go under and buy the pieces.

Yah, that's what I wrote earlier. I don't think there's any way a buy would take on all of the different satellite offices. Anyone who buys would do it for the IP and/or the talent, but it would probably be a scorched earth scenario.
 
Looking at all the shambles, it makes it even more intriguing that Crytek continued with so many purchases (Homefront IP, for example). I get the feeling that the top of the corporate ladder felt they were too big/too technologically accomplished to fail. And the following article from Eurogamer seems to indicate that is likely what happened. IE - Expanding quickly without a sound business foundation.


In an interesting twist, one could string together a convoluted theory where Ryse 2 was the downfall of Crytek. :D I'm sure that would have been a rather nice and desperately needed cash infusion. But I imagine Yerli did not want a repeat of what happened with FarCry where they did not own the IP.

I could see Microsoft buying them to own Crysis and Ryse, but have different developers work on them internally, or put new management in place at the studio that was in charge of Ryse, but keep the technical talent and artists.

It's hard to see a scenario where EA wouldn't outbid Microsoft in an attempt to keep the Crysis franchise under EA publication/control. This is assuming it goes to bankruptcy proceeding and a sell off of company IP happens similar to now defunct THQ. Microsoft would likely have an easy time getting the Ryse IP, however.

Regards,
SB
 
Not sure if this has been answered, but would a Crysis trilogy pack for ps4 and X1 be any useful to save the company at this stage? I'm sure they could be a nice addition to the remaster trend that's so popular these days.
 
I'd wonder if Crysis would have any value to MS. They're not particularly hot sellers. MS probably doesn't want another 1st party FPS either, Halo is enough (though I've argued I'd like to see a 2nd 1st party FPS from MS, with Halo now going near annual, it's less pressing).

Not sure if this has been answered, but would a Crysis trilogy pack for ps4 and X1 be any useful to save the company at this stage?

Doesn't seem like it could have hurt. I would have loved it, if only to dissect the technical aspects of the ports.
 
Doesn't seem like it could have hurt. I would have loved it, if only to dissect the technical aspects of the ports.

Hilariously, Crysis 1 could very well look better than Crysis 2.
 
every team at MS is using different engines , some are in house and some are 3rd party like ue4.


Buy crytek , down size all but the engine guys and slowly start adopting it throughout MS and its 2nd parties .

Every tweak or feature added will ripple down to everyone. Much better than having a bunch of different engines.

This goes for any of the companies sony / Nintendo or even a third party like ubi soft. EA is doing this with frostbite , all teams have been moving to it.

For what?

You don't buy a company for that. You can simply license the IP.
 
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