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Update: After the publication of our original story, a Crytek employee reached out to us to explain a bit more about what has been going on behind the scenes at the company over the last six months. You can find the new story with more inside information, HERE.
Original Story: Way back in June 2014, we began hearing whispers of Crytek going bankrupt, after developers at the Crytek UK studio went months without full pay, this was seemingly confirmed after Crytek UK was sold off to the publisher Deep Silver so that work on Homefront: The Revolution could continue. At the time, Crytek denied it had serious money troubles but now here we are in 2016, and the same reports are popping back up again. This time, a German Crytek employee is claiming people haven't been paid properly for almost six months.
The original post was put together on imgur late last night, with a supposed Crytek employee based in Germany explaining that management is all over the place right now and a lot of people are going unpaid for months at a time. There is also apparently a massive lack of communication between management and their teams.
The post reads: “This has happened in the past a few times, but never for this long. Management never gives anyone a heads up, and it isn’t clear to me if they are getting paid or even informed from the owners. The last time this happened we were told it would be the last time and yet it is happening again. Many of my co-workers moved from out of the country to work here and are unable to leave because they cannot afford to get back home due to their wages being withheld for so long.”
“People are afraid to speak out because we are continuously told “You don’t understand because you don’t see the whole picture like we do— wages are coming soon”. According to the post, a meeting was held a few months back, during which these payment issues were said to be resolved but that has apparently not been the case.
Unfortunately, we don't have much in the way of proof for the claims made on imgur and this particular source hasn't been vetted by any news outlets at the time of writing. However, LPVG has been in touch with its own source inside of Crytek's Bulgarian studio, known as ‘Black Sea Studios'. This source has been vetted and they are making some similar claims.
Apparently, Black Sea Studios is now up for sale and employees there have had irregular pay for almost five months. A lot of this is said to be down to the fact that Crytek hasn't made a profit in a very long time. It hasn't released a big game in years and the Crytek engine doesn't appear to be bringing in much money either.
KitGuru Says: Given the position Crytek employees found themselves in back in 2014, it wouldn't be too surprising to hear that issues have arose once again. Given the similarities between the claims being made at Crytek's German-based studio and those being made at its Bulgarian studio, it is safe to assume that these problems are affecting the company as a whole and not just one branch in particular.
“have arisen”. 😉
Honestly the last time this happened they made a lot of compromises that I don’t think they can really recover from. They lost a lot of the original devs and they made deals to get cash fast by selling source code licenses that’s meant that the CryEngine has now been significantly branched a couple of times so it’s in some ways competing with itself.
The derivate branches are now more advanced in some ways than the core engine, if you look at what CIG did they cherry picked a lot of CryTeks best people, implemented features they wanted for their game and the old crytek devs had been wanting to and from all indications now have an engine that’s Cryengine based, but in many respects a lot better than the current generation of CryEngine. And that’s really the death nell for Crytek in my view, when your licensees are consistently improving your product more than you are(and doing it so impressively in the case of CIG) you’ve lost.
Crytek also really made mistakes in not keeping up their main franchise and doing frankly idiotic things with it. The lost Far Cry for legitimate reasons, but Crysis they went in all the wrong direction with it after the first one and just gave up on it. The Crysis name still has a lot of pull, abandoning it in favour of Homefront and Ryse was a real mistake, and not investing enough in the engines capabilities and it’s associated tools is the other one.
It’s a sad story for Crytek, it really is… At this point, more rather would join up with Cloud Imperium than not get paid fully in 5 months. This really goes to show how their management is “managing” it, actually they got no idea of what to do. Star Citizen, Kingdom Come deliverance and many other AAA and crowd funded games that rely on CryEngine have obviously modded and improved versions of it for their own game…
I think they just need to try and release another Crysis game, in the hopes to bring the company up on foot, otherwise bankruptcy is imminent.
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Don’t forget Amazon’s Lumberyard. Despite being a “beta” it is much better than CryEngine. Amazon started off with the CE source code. However, they have heavily modified it, so it is not as CE based any more as it could have been.
I am from Crytek Frankfurt and confim what is being written. The situation in Crytek is very bad, I would say dramatic. People don’t believe the management anymore. People are now very angry at the management and even HR. The first problems this year appeared when salaries for June 2016 were late. Then managment told us the problem is just a technical delay, for next 3 months – June, July and..possibly..maybe…August. The reality showed salary for July arrived mid August, and for August mid September. Later was only worse. Salary for September arrived on 31st of October. 1 month delay. Later…we in Frankfurt did not receive any salary. No salary for October and November. People are leaving, handing out letters to HR to state they will not work if the money will not arrive. Salaries for last 2 months not paid to us. They have no money…