Most of Crytek's UK Staff Have Stopped Going to Work

We told you last week of rumblings of non-payment of employees at Crytek studios and this week brought no relief. Workers are reportedly no longer coming to work and that production has ceased. The rumor now is that the company will be picked up by Deep Silver, the developer of Dead Island.

According to those people, Crytek’s UK staff have still not been paid the full amounts they are owed, and this week, according to two sources, the staff at Crytek’s UK office handed in formal grievance letters and went home.

Click to expand...

Another rumor is that Sony has contacted them also.

Can they run from Crysis?

I believe these are signs that the gaming industry has been moving towards a crash. It's not just Crytek that's about to go under. A lot of studios have been firing or losing developers.

Take a look at their conundra.

Xbox 360 - 83.7 million sales
PlayStation 3 - 80 million sales
WIi U - 6.17 million sales
Playstation 4 - 7 million sales
Xbox One - 5.1 million

Just to give you some idea, the Dreamcast sold 10 million and was considered a failure. The Playstation 2 sold 155 million. If you're a game developer you won't be making games specifically for the Xbox One or PS4. Just small graphic bumps that the PC also enjoys. Without games being made specifically for those platforms, there's even less of a reason to own one.

That leaves PC gaming as a good alternative, but Crytek knows that PC gamers aren't a good source of money. We pirate a lot of their games, and expect sales for their games. Especially weekend games like the ones Crytek makes. They want the suckers that exist on 360 and PS3, but even they are fading away.

The game industry is heading for a crash, and believe me it's a good thing.

it is sad if crytek goes down.
but their management is stupid, 1st they got screwed over by Ubisoft, when they took from them farcry franchise, so they went and made the same mistake with microsoft, fight over the franchise of Ryse son of rome, so microsoft droped them in the middle the develpement of Ryse sequel, so money stoped coming, and now they can't even port the game to PS4 or PC to leverage some of the money invested in the game, 1-the game wasn't good, 2-xbox sold units are too low to make it good investement, few months back i heard that crytek was porting ryse to pc, maybe thats what started all this with microsoft, that already have a crappy consoles sales, and way too little exclusives.
why did they go for consoles, they were doing well on PC.
maybe they should start a kickstarter, to save the company, it would be better than selling it.
beside 200 employees wth, how many games are they working on to have that many ppl ? get ride of dead weight.

Ashbringer said:

I believe these are signs that the gaming industry has been moving towards a crash. It's not just Crytek that's about to go under. A lot of studios have been firing or losing developers.

Take a look at their conundra.

Xbox 360 - 83.7 million sales
PlayStation 3 - 80 million sales
WIi U - 6.17 million sales
Playstation 4 - 7 million sales
Xbox One - 5.1 million

Just to give you some idea, the Dreamcast sold 10 million and was considered a failure. The Playstation 2 sold 155 million. If you're a game developer you won't be making games specifically for the Xbox One or PS4. Just small graphic bumps that the PC also enjoys. Without games being made specifically for those platforms, there's even less of a reason to own one.

That leaves PC gaming as a good alternative, but Crytek knows that PC gamers aren't a good source of money. We pirate a lot of their games, and expect sales for their games. Especially weekend games like the ones Crytek makes. They want the suckers that exist on 360 and PS3, but even they are fading away.

The game industry is heading for a crash, and believe me it's a good thing.

Click to expand...

I think you have some valid point, but I think this is just the beginning of a lot of consolidations. So many small shops rode the boom and simply can't survive the current climate. The ones with good assets will be gobbled up while the rest will disappear completely.

hmmm.. Reminds me of a saying " those who dont learn from the past are doomed to repeat" the cycle repeats every gen, with sales slowing down dujring the end of one console gen and till sales of next gen pick ups.

it's too early to talk about this gen of consoles sales, they started with no games, no exclusives, nothing to sell the console with, these consoles should have came 3 years ago, or should have waited next year.
it's stupid to come with a ship generation that have been dragged around for few years on pc, 48nm technology, when the 20nm will show next year.
that will drive the gap even further between pc and consoles, 16nm in 2016...my guess is the ps4 and xbox1 will be amulated on pc in 2014 when Mantle gets an open SDK.

my guess is the ps4 and xbox1 will be emulated on pc in 2015 when Mantle gets an open SDK.

alamox said:

it's too early to talk about this gen of consoles sales, they started with no games, no exclusives, nothing to sell the console with, these consoles should have came 3 years ago, or should have waited next year.
it's stupid to come with a ship generation that have been dragged around for few years on pc, 48nm technology, when the 20nm will show next year.
that will drive the gap even further between pc and consoles, 16nm in 2016...my guess is the ps4 and xbox1 will be amulated on pc in 2014 when Mantle gets an open SDK.

Click to expand...

There are no games on PS4 or Xbone worth emulating that PC doesn't already play better.
There will be no emulation of BigCorp consoles while lawyers exist

doug_7506 said:

I think you have some valid point, but I think this is just the beginning of a lot of consolidations. So many small shops rode the boom and simply can't survive the current climate. The ones with good assets will be gobbled up while the rest will disappear completely.

Click to expand...

Everyone is trying to assess the situation with gaming sales. They don't know what gamers want anymore. To be honest, gamers don't know what they want. But look at the last gaming crash from the 70's. What killed that generation of gaming? Clones for one. So many games that were copy cats of other games. The second thing that killed it was crapware games. So many games that aren't worth a dime, let alone your time. We're starting to see this today with Battlefield and COD clones. It's not as badly done as it was back then, but still same shit and another $60.

It took Nintendo to turn video games around from a score based board like game, to an adventure style type of game.

alamox said:

it's too early to talk about this gen of consoles sales, they started with no games, no exclusives, nothing to sell the console with, these consoles should have came 3 years ago, or should have waited next year.
SDK.

Click to expand...

Those consoles need exclusives worth a damn. Not even Nintendo released their console with a single good exclusive.

Ashbringer said:

I believe these are signs that the gaming industry has been moving towards a crash. It's not just Crytek that's about to go under. A lot of studios have been firing or losing developers.

Take a look at their conundra.

Xbox 360 - 83.7 million sales
PlayStation 3 - 80 million sales
WIi U - 6.17 million sales
Playstation 4 - 7 million sales
Xbox One - 5.1 million

Just to give you some idea, the Dreamcast sold 10 million and was considered a failure. The Playstation 2 sold 155 million. If you're a game developer you won't be making games specifically for the Xbox One or PS4. Just small graphic bumps that the PC also enjoys. Without games being made specifically for those platforms, there's even less of a reason to own one.

That leaves PC gaming as a good alternative, but Crytek knows that PC gamers aren't a good source of money. We pirate a lot of their games, and expect sales for their games. Especially weekend games like the ones Crytek makes. They want the suckers that exist on 360 and PS3, but even they are fading away.

The game industry is heading for a crash, and believe me it's a good thing.

Click to expand...

what you call a crash, i call a reckoning.

crysis 3 must not have sold very well, guess thats there fault for not having it on steam

Ashbringer said:

That leaves PC gaming as a good alternative, but Crytek knows that PC gamers aren't a good source of money. We pirate a lot of their games, and expect sales for their games. Especially weekend games like the ones Crytek makes. They want the suckers that exist on 360 and PS3, but even they are fading away.

Click to expand...

According to the numbers, piracy simply isn't an issue for the PC. PC sales figures are higher than any of the consoles, which means if you consider the PC the "Microsoft Windowsbone", it outsells the Xbox, Playstation, and Wii as the most successful platform. We don't add up sales of the Xbox, Wii, and PC and say "non-Sony products are dominating the Playstation four to one", so why would we combine all console options against the PC? Never understood that logic.

Designing a game on the Playstation is as different from the PC as it is to the Xbox, so each requires independent investment. As the top gaming platform, there's no reason not to invest in the PC, or at least the Nintendo, Playstation, or Xbox with their lower revenues would fall first.

Crytek's problems are simply one of mismanagement, and competitors offering superior bang for their buck. Remember, it is EXTREMELY rare in any industry for the highest quality option to be crowned king. Its almost always the option that's good enough at a lower price, and as such the expensive Cryengine just isn't winning that war.

Dregan73 said:

crysis 3 must not have sold very well, guess thats there fault for not having it on steam

Click to expand...

Origin isnt a good platform to sell games in, still the biggest loss of crytek came from ryse son of rome, it cost them way too much, and apparently microsoft wanted it for the exclusive console launch, so the deadline was set, the game came unfished, bad, then few months later forbids crytek from porting it to pc, then cancels the sequel, in my opinion crytek management suck, and microsoft really screwed them over very bad, gave them a blow they might not recover from.

I know "innovation" in gaming is harder to come by these days (especially since so many games have gone the XP & unlocks route of progression typically reserved for MMOs), and since most games are just cleverly decorated Skinner boxes, it takes a lot for a developer to make a truly revolutionary game.

The biggest problem I have is that I can get great value out of cheap games (Minecraft, CS:GO, etc.) and almost no value out of AAA titles (I bought Titanfall for $60 and have less than 1 hour in the game), so I am naturally very risk-averse in gaming purchases now.

I bought BF3 and initially loved it (except for Battlelog, that website was garbage), but in less than 6 months, everyone had bought the expansion packs, and I didn't want to dump more money into a $60 game for more maps, so all the stock rotation servers were empty. Then, you had to shell out another $40 for Premium if you wanted to keep up. That game eventually died for me due to the nickel-and-diming. It looked great and was a lot of fun, but I was unwilling to buy the expansions.

Honestly, and this sounds bad, but I can't even remember if I bought BF4. I probably did, and I probably have less than 20 hours in the game. I remember thinking it looked exactly like BF3. There was no leap in gameplay or graphics, but they wanted $60 for it about 2 years later, and then they had Premium available at release for another $50-60! There's no way I'm going to spend $100+ for what amounts to a reskin and new unlocks. That's ridiculous.

I absolutely get that dev shops have to ride their AAA franchises into the ground, because they're the only games that they can count on getting good sales numbers with, but I've been scared off of all AAA releases in the past year or two because they're the exact same bland reskin of a once-great franchise game. It's funny, because $60 for 10 hours of gameplay is a better dollars per hour of entertainment than a movie ticket, but I still feel incredibly burned if I buy a $60 game and put less than 100 hours into it.

I think the gaming industry has a major problem with hitting the glass ceiling on gameplay features and interacting with the player on this hardware generation. How much more lens flare can they throw into BF5? We know they aren't changing the basic mechanics of a shooter. They can only make the environment a certain level of destructible. They can only make so many game modes. We've reached the point where games could potentially live 5+ years, but they're forcing obsolescence with a yearly release for another $60. I'd rather see $15 map packs every 4 months or so.

I think Valve has the right idea with their "operations" for CS:GO. New drops, new maps, and a couple of feature tweaks (like missions and rewards) every couple of months for $5-6. I can easily justify buying the new operation pass because I get hours of gameplay and it's a much lower entry cost. I can choose not to participate in the cases-and-keys nonsense without losing any gameplay or being left behind by my friends. The game lasts longer and they can continue to devote dev time to it, and it seems like everyone is happier.

I agree that this seems like a reckoning for the pricing and release models for major studios, and I'm hoping they can understand that people would be willing to pay for a great base game that offers longevity if they can be assured of reasonably-priced expansion packs and continued development. I'd absolutely pay $60 for BF5 if EA said "We're making the base game absolutely as good as we can and we plan to offer a $10-15 expansion pack 6 months in. We'll offer these packs every 6 months for the next 2-3 years or until we're ready to release our next killer feature. We recognize that our customers and markets are getting saturated by full-price releases and we're doing our best to offer a better value with a classic, well-known gaming franchise."

Oh, and stop the "Gamestop exclusive" or "Wal-Mart exclusive" items. I understand pre-purchase exclusives even if I find them a bit distasteful, but offering something exclusive based on where you buy the game is infuriating to me.

Interesting to see this, as I was looking at several of their job listings back in May.
I don't think you can use those numbers to reach a conclusion that gaming is approaching a crash. From what I quickly found, the 360 in its first year sold about 7.5 million units, which is right in line with the PS4's current numbers after 8 months. The Wii U, like the Dreamcast, released at the wrong time and in the wrong way. The Dreamcast was a fantastic system, but it released barely a year before the PS2 (in the US), after Sega had already screwed up with the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn. The Wii was a runaway success in the first half of its life, then quickly tailed off. I don't recall Nintendo doing a very good job of marketing the Wii U at all, as it was a "next-gen" system that came across as an add-on peripheral with no marquee games in the first year, at the tail end of a generation that was one year away from the introduction of the One and PS4. A more likely indicator would be the sales numbers and attachment rates in the second year of the systems, after intended system sellers have been released (assuming exclusives are scheduled at this time, I'm not aware of current development).
I don't believe that a crash is imminent, as the gaming landscape is radically different than it was in the 80's, and I believe that gaming has become far too commonplace for a crash to happen anytime soon. Gaming was still relatively new at that time - consider the simple fact that you didn't have 30 and 40-year-old gamers who had spent their entire lives with a controller in hand.
With that being said, I have been gaming since the release of the NES, and this is the first generation of consoles that seems to have zero buzz around it. I only know one person that has an Xbox One or a PS4 (he bought both at release), and he told me Thursday that he hasn't played either one in a while because there is absolutely nothing to play. While the PS3 / 360 / Wii are old tech, I still don't feel the need to move on from them, and no one has given me reason to reconsider spending $400+ for a marginal upgrade. This seems to be a prevailing sentiment from people that I have talked to and on message boards.
I'm far from a gaming elitist, but I do think that there is a glut of crap console games and clones that will hopefully be filtered out of the system soon enough (as happened to Guitar Hero / Rock Band). Production budgets are ballooning, and quality control seems to be an afterthought. Games have become more cinematic and less interactive. I'm not a programmer, but I keep thinking that the prevailing thought during development must be "we've created this beautifully realistic game engine, but it's too damn difficult to give the player freedom because of all the extra modeling and interactions we would have to create and code, plus we have to make 12 more games with this engine in the next 10 months, plus we still have loads of bugs to fix, but those can be corrected after release, so let's just make everything cinematic, throw in a few QTEs, and call it a day." Mobile gaming on phones and tablets seems to be the new trend, as well as this whole free-to-play, pay-to-win movement.
One encouraging thing for me is that several of my friends and acquaintances have recently moved from solely console gaming to PC gaming, opening up a new gaming world to explore. I didn't want to ruin it for my roommate, so several months ago I just gave him a general guideline of parts needed to build a PC - he did the research on his own, ordered and assembled everything, then logged into Steam. Since then, I have only seen him use his 360 for Netflix. He was addicted to Skyrim on the 360, and is amazed at the amount of mod content available for the PC. I love consoles (I own the majority of systems released since the NES), but I have always had a fond place in my gaming heart for PCs.
I would expect to see more studio closures and / or acquisitions, until they learn how to properly manage an organizational structure, project budget, development timeline, and consumer interests.

AAA needs to die, its just harmful.

Ashbringer said:

Everyone is trying to assess the situation with gaming sales. They don't know what gamers want anymore. To be honest, gamers don't know what they want. But look at the last gaming crash from the 70's. What killed that generation of gaming? Clones for one. So many games that were copy cats of other games. The second thing that killed it was crapware games. So many games that aren't worth a dime, let alone your time. We're starting to see this today with Battlefield and COD clones. It's not as badly done as it was back then, but still same shit and another $60.

It took Nintendo to turn video games around from a score based board like game, to an adventure style type of game.


Those consoles need exclusives worth a damn. Not even Nintendo released their console with a single good exclusive.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, this is not the type of crash that can be recovered from like the one in the early 80s. AAA games are remarkably expensive to create and take a lot of time now. They're basically Hollywood-budget in terms of development. Improvements in technology won't help because the development is still far beyond a modest studio. Back then, it was possible for a small group of people to create a AAA game then. Figure out the logic and engineer it. Often you had people be a coder and artist and musician. How many people area top talent graphics artist, musician, and software developer while being fluent in linear algebra?

If the industry does crash, it will regress for at least a decade. It probably won't be this drastic, but we could see only a handful of AAA games every year for a console.

And it's not surprising about the people at Crytek. If I didn't get paid, I'm looking after this first paycheck. Paycheck two doesn't come? Why should I work? Companies aren't loyal to you to begin with, so why be loyal back especially if they're not paying?

Man Rockstar should buy them! I can only imagine how bad ass a game like red dead redemption remastered for the PC with cryengine 3 would look. Even newer versions of GTA with that game engine would look insane.

Dregan73 said:

crysis 3 must not have sold very well, guess thats there fault for not having it on steam

Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking.

The funny thing is I don't even have a PC that can play Crysis 3, but if it was on Steam then I would have most likely bought it by now. Especially with the Summer sales.

Spazturtle said:

AAA needs to die, its just harmful.

Click to expand...

I don't think that would solve anything. Gaming has somehow centered around money the last few years. Game developers no longer create niche games, ones that tell a good story that really appeal to pontential "fanatics" of that genre. Everybody wants to cash out with as little effort as possible. It is like watching Stephen King write a Tom Clancy type novel because he believes he will make more money doing that. There is no fault tolerance for newer games, no modding in battlefield, and I haven't kept up with call of duty to know what is going on with that game. By todays standards Skyrim should be dead.

I guess I still agree with your sentiments Spaz. Blockbusters are the only thing releasing for major companies but it doesn't hold that much for me in terms of entertainment.

Half Life 3 will be the redeemer. I don't care if it bombs, I want to finish that story to the end.

Spazturtle said:

AAA needs to die, its just harmful.

Click to expand...

He's right we should all just sit around playing different variations of flappy birds.

alamox said:

my guess is the ps4 and xbox1 will be emulated on pc in 2015 when Mantle gets an open SDK.

Click to expand...

1. Nvidia has no interest in Mantle so it is specific to AMD.

2. The Xbox One uses DirectX 12 which PCs will use that is a direct competitor to Mantle.

I don't believe this will be the case at least for Microsoft.

I would lean more towards DirectX 12 bridging the gap for Microsoft's console and PC.

Someone else may have better insight.

Dregan73 said:

crysis 3 must not have sold very well, guess thats there fault for not having it on steam

Click to expand...

It's a combination of a lot of things, not only just Crysis 3.

Firstly was the fact that the CryEngine was not selling well, especially compared to Frostbite.

Second was Ryse, it was expensive, and they foolishly made it Xbox One exclusive. It didn't sell well

jon666 said:

Half Life 3 will be the redeemer. I don't care if it bombs, I want to finish that story to the end.

Click to expand...

Is it really worth the weight? Anyways, I actually feel that major action game titles have not been innovating in the last few years. It's almost as if that studios no longer dare to be different... so there's no revolutionary works that can compare to HL, Bioshock, Rainbow 6 and System Shock 2 as of late...

my guess is the ps4 and xbox1 will be amulated on pc in 2014 when Mantle gets an open SDK.

Click to expand...

What does Mantle have to do with it? The new consoles don't use Mantle, Mantle is just something that has efficiency improvements over DirectX. While the hardware is very similar to modern PCs, there's no guarantee at all we'll see an emulator anytime soon. I mean hell, the Xbox 360 and PS3 still don't have ones.

I would expect to see more studio closures and / or acquisitions, until they learn how to properly manage an organizational structure, project budget, development timeline, and consumer interests.

Click to expand...

I want to be cynical and say that will never fucking happen for any company that has publicly traded stock. There's too much pressure working against that.

If the industry does crash, it will regress for at least a decade. It probably won't be this drastic, but we could see only a handful of AAA games every year for a console.

Click to expand...

Actually I think what's more likely is it would mutate in ways that would be difficult to predict. Consoles and AAA titles could definitely crash, but that will barely even slow down gaming on the PC, if anything it would just keep moving forward with a more organic process of the good games rising to the top. Hell, while Valve is screwing around with Steambox, it's not out of the question you could see small formfactor PCs custom-tailored towards gaming (meaning you boot up and you immediately have big menus with gamepad control to get to your games) start getting sold to fill in the console gap.

Why did Crytek make Ryse an Xbox One exclusive anyway? Was it their idea or was it Microsoft's idea?

Anyway, kind of sucks that Crytek is facing financial difficulty, and we are talking about people losing their jobs because of it.

ChronoDetector said:

Why did Crytek make Ryse an Xbox One exclusive anyway? Was it their idea or was it Microsoft's idea?

Anyway, kind of sucks that Crytek is facing financial difficulty, and we are talking about people losing their jobs because of it.

Click to expand...

It was MS' idea as a Xbox exclusive. Crytek was dumb enough to buy out on that and agree to the lofty development terms MS set. MS has in the past made harsh terms but they were always willing to listen to the developer, in this case MS came to Crytek and Crytek just said YUP! lets do eeet!

Look at Vanguard for example. They played MS very well, to the point MS didn't care if it released and just told Sigil they wouldn't pay them anymore after a product never surfaced.

Crytek has great developers but it seems those same developers are also the business managers and they are terrible at it. I hope they recover and stay their own company. Too many developers get bought out and turn out to be garbage shortly after.

Ashbringer said:

The game industry is heading for a crash, and believe me it's a good thing.

Click to expand...

It's kind of like Hollywood. It was either Spielberg or Cameron who said that Hollywood is about 3 or 4 movies away from a crash. With $200 million to $300 million practically becoming standard movie budgets, all it will take is 3 or 4 failures of this magnitude before all big budget movies will cease. The same is happening with video games. You cant keep up these 5 year dev cycles in a couple hundred mill and expect it to work.

Hey this generation of consoles is doing great!

After 8+ months on the open market I now know one person who has them.

Everyone else is....."Nah, can't be bothered!"

Previous gen after the same amount of time I knew at least 6-8 people with a 360.

The adults have grown up and got kids, the kids now have phones and tablets.

Totally different market to 2006.

daglesj said:

The adults have grown up and got kids, the kids now have phones and tablets.

Totally different market to 2006.

Click to expand...

I refuse to believe that Flappy Bird and Bejeweled are a replacement for Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto.

Ducman69 said:

I refuse to believe that Flappy Bird and Bejeweled are a replacement for Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto.

Click to expand...

Elder Scrolls Tower Defense ... Grand Theft Angry Birds ... Call of Duty Garden Design ... the possibilities are endless

Ducman69 said:

I refuse to believe that Flappy Bird and Bejeweled are a replacement for Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto.

Click to expand...

At the end of the day its just 'time wasting'. Kids used to do that with a bat and a ball on a piece of elastic.

This time the games can go anywhere. You don't have to be stuck in the living room or bedroom.

Ducman69 said:

I refuse to believe that Flappy Bird and Bejeweled are a replacement for Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto.

Click to expand...

That's what Minecraft is for.

Crytek has been swirling down the crapper for years. Far Cry and Crysis were great games, but everything they've made since then has been consolized shovelware. This is what they get for betraying their fanbase on the PC to make shitty console games.

Not enough innovation.

Everything is too samey.

If i were to put my money on something revitalizing the gaming industry its going to be a combination of Occulus Rift (VR Tech), and Kinect (camera tracking) integration.

If someone can make a console that works as an easy to use complete package this will be where gaming is at. It's completely immersive, and it's another reason to keep gaming in the living room / bedroom and not mobile.