Crytek in financial trouble?

Ubisoft will buy it and magically a game/engine that ran fine and blew everyone else away graphically on a 2GB GPU will need a minimum of 4GB of VRAM, SSD, and 16GB of RAM
 
I need a better source than this site

Also the way they handle the engine is a joke compared to Epic. That doesn't really do them any favors.
 
socK said:
I need a better source than this site

Also the way they handle the engine is a joke compared to Epic. That doesn't really do them any favors.
Click to expand...


The Crysis Series was always mediocre. Nothing about it really stands out apart from the engine. So much so that I'll never forget the comment many many years ago from one of the Crytek folk about how despite Crysis not being a big seller it was a game that everyone used if not for just benchmarking. That held true, but holy crap that is not going to do a developer any good.

The engine had so much potential in 2007, except they took it nowhere until just recently. The main focus was always on the, "WOW" factor and many games run like shit if they aren't heavily optimized because they tried to future proof the crap out of it. Much like id Tech 5, both engines kind of failed in their own way. It surprised me they even tried to compete with Epic on the monthly subscription model. Epic has enough cash from huge licensing deals they've built for a decade and a very strong developer following that they don't have.

Shame though, hopefully the engine does at least continue with the original developers.
 
Never enjoyed the storylines and gameplay to a degree in crysis. I mainly played them just for graphics and benchmarking purposes.
 
Liger88 said:
...I'll never forget the comment many many years ago from one of the Crytek folk about how despite Crysis not being a big seller it was a game that everyone used if not for just benchmarking...
Click to expand...

The thing is Crysis and Warhead actually sold reasonably well for a PC only game....over 5 million copies combined. Crytek and in particular Yerli just had warped expectations because they strongly believed Crysis should have had the same financial success as CoD or Halo without realizing why those games actually succeeded or recognizing why Crysis was different.
 
This is unfortunate if true. A Crytek-owned and maintained Cryengine is probably good for the industry.

Crytek probably still has the most advanced lighting engine around, esp. because Epic decided to ditch voxel-cone-tracing in UE4 and use Enlighten (also used in the latest Frostbite and Unity).

Epic seems to have really fleshed out the development environment in UE4. I hope Crytek continues to place emphasis on development tools... it's a war, and Unity (which still seems behind, but popular with indie devs) and UE4 have quickened the pace.

If Crytek really is having trouble, maybe they should revise their engine-as-a-service model and add a 2-3%-of-revenue royalty, still undercutting Epic if they ditch or partially absorb the ?~$750? Wwise audio engine license.

We need Crytek around as competition.

I've actually come to appreciate Crysis as more than a benchmark. I can't really figure out why it's a bad game (though I still wouldn't expect it to sell like CoD)... it offered a great degree of freedom, physics played a significant role in the gameplay if the player chose to utilize it, blah... it was a decent game. I'm ignoring Crysis 2 (which did suck)...and I haven't played Crysis 3.
 
Last edited:
From what I understand Cryengine was very expensive. To be fair, it was more advanced than UE3 in many ways. I also believe support was just not as good as Epic. Now I think they have done a good job improving it (from what I hear) and there certainly are some games that will be using it in the near future. But so far, aside from Crysis, no major titles used the engine.

It is too bad as the engine certainly can look amazing.

Archmage said:
If Crytek really is having trouble, maybe they should revise their engine-as-a-service model and add a 2-3%-of-revenue royalty, still undercutting Epic if they ditch or partially absorb the ?~$750? Wwise audio engine license.

We need Crytek around as competition.

I've actually come to appreciate Crysis as more than a benchmark. I can't really figure out why it's a bad game... it offered a great degree of freedom, physics played a significant role in the gameplay if the player chose to utilize it, blah... it was a decent game. I'm ignoring Crysis 2 (which did suck)...and I haven't played Crysis 3.
Click to expand...

It was explained to me that Cryengine 3 is more expensive than UE4 in that you have to buy more plugins and whatnot. So adding a royalty fee would make it even more expensive than UE4.
 
Hitching their wagon to an Xbone exclusive was completely idiotic, regardless of what Microsoft moneyhatted them, because it obviously wasn't enough. But I guess they couldn't have anticipated what a disaster that console would have been back when the deal was made.
 
styckx said:
Ubisoft will buy it and magically a game/engine that ran fine and blew everyone else away graphically on a 2GB GPU will need a minimum of 4GB of VRAM, SSD, and 16GB of RAM
Click to expand...

And no one will be the wiser.
 
Flogger23m said:
It is too bad as the engine certainly can look amazing.
Click to expand...
Yep, I know this is a demo for Quixel, but (destructible) environments like these would be AMAZING. I'd like to use something like this, albeit more open for a PVP-arena, for a few gameplay types: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CeRcJHdJbo - 1080p must

The same channel has an UE4 demo as well though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjTQwZRUfb8 - some impressive textures
Flogger23m said:
It was explained to me that Cryengine 3 is more expensive than UE4 in that you have to buy more plugins and whatnot. So adding a royalty fee would make it even more expensive than UE4.
Click to expand...

I'm hoping Crytek will catch up a bit in that regard. It is true that the toolset is not as broad as what Epic offers, but I don't know enough to be able to estimate the impact on development costs. The community and asset store for Unity is quite huge, so that seems to attract the indie devs who thus far haven't needed the greatest tech or even large-scale terrain support (64-bit editor, level-streaming, better multi-threading -coming in Unity 5)

But... I don't really know what I'm talking about. :) Need to discuss this with some real devs I guess.
 
Last edited:
crysis 1 is a great game. 2 is shit. 3 is extremely mediocre with a lot of bad design choices, namely characters and ui. i mean, i dunno how you go from the pretty cool alien design in 1 to the fucking retarded tentacle jelly guys in 2 and 3. horrible.
 
Yep, Crytek is busteds. Let's see who's going to buy them. I think 800 employees is a bit too much, even if most of them are not located in the first world.
 
Personally, the big issue with crytek was their approachability. I've used unreal for my artwork for ages, and I was not at all enticed to try out CE 3. I know it is a far more advanced engine, but at the same time it was kind-of a one-trick-pony with what crytek tried to make with it. The original Crysis did some amazing things, but Crysis 2 was rubbish, and Crysis 3 was boring. And really, I didn't see any unique artistic concepts or outreach to the community in regards of showing off techniques or examples.
 
I could care-less about their main studio's, Crysis 2-3 were fun games but I could live without them. I'm unfortunately really looking forward to what Free Radical (Crytek UK) is doing with the new Homefront.

They need to figure out a way to leverage their engine better, it's always had dismal 3rd party support/use compared to UE and other competing properties.
 
Farcy 1 fan but that is about it not enough ambition to buy the other games Crysis was the biggest game to come down the pipline can your PC run Crysis the answer was mainly NO nobody could.
 
Flogger23m said:
From what I understand Cryengine was very expensive. To be fair, it was more advanced than UE3 in many ways. I also believe support was just not as good as Epic. Now I think they have done a good job improving it (from what I hear) and there certainly are some games that will be using it in the near future. But so far, aside from Crysis, no major titles used the engine.

It is too bad as the engine certainly can look amazing.



It was explained to me that Cryengine 3 is more expensive than UE4 in that you have to buy more plugins and whatnot. So adding a royalty fee would make it even more expensive than UE4.
Click to expand...

I personally feel part of the issue is a timing problem. The Unreal Engine is familiar, the CryENGINE is not. Even the original CryENGINE in Far Cry came out way too late. The first Unreal Engine came out in 1998. The Quake Engine came out in 1996. The CryENGINE? 2004. That's half a decade (or more) that developers were able to become comfortable with it. And it also doesn't help that technology was skyrocketing in terms of what it could do from the mid 1990s through early 2000s.
 
Blade-Runner said:
The thing is Crysis and Warhead actually sold reasonably well for a PC only game....over 5 million copies combined. Crytek and in particular Yerli just had warped expectations because they strongly believed Crysis should have had the same financial success as CoD or Halo without realizing why those games actually succeeded or recognizing why Crysis was different.
Click to expand...

Imagine CoD or Halo with Crisis-type graphics. Line me up to the feeding trough because I would buy that.
 
They will be bought by Ubi or EA, which will then swiftly "re-negotiate" the terms under which Star Citizen can use the engine. Interesting times ahead for sure.
 
Odellus said:
crysis 1 is a great game. 2 is shit. 3 is extremely mediocre with a lot of bad design choices, namely characters and ui. i mean, i dunno how you go from the pretty cool alien design in 1 to the fucking retarded tentacle jelly guys in 2 and 3. horrible.
Click to expand...

I always felt Crysis 1 was a mediocre game in the very nice looking wrapping... assuming you had a monster rig to play it at high settings. If you didn't, it also looked pretty mediocre at lower settings. I remember feeling COD4 looked better on my system at 40-60fps than whatever setting I ended up feeling happy with in Crysis 1 which wasn't a tremendously low end rig (I think that was back when I had the 8800GTS).

Warhead I felt was a slightly better game.

2 was just a typical modern FPS game. I thought it was done reasonably well, but if you were expecting anything other than a typical modern FPS game you might have been disappointed.

Haven't played Crysis 3 yet, I keep missing the 50% off sales, lol.
 
Nytegard said:
I personally feel part of the issue is a timing problem. The Unreal Engine is familiar, the CryENGINE is not. Even the original CryENGINE in Far Cry came out way too late. The first Unreal Engine came out in 1998. The Quake Engine came out in 1996. The CryENGINE? 2004. That's half a decade (or more) that developers were able to become comfortable with it. And it also doesn't help that technology was skyrocketing in terms of what it could do from the mid 1990s through early 2000s.
Click to expand...


I think a lot of people forget how old Crytek is. Back in the day they were just a little known studio, but they've been around for quite awhile. They were so far ahead of the curve in some ways engine wise and on the graphics front. I still remember watching my buddy play FarCry only having heard about it previously, and I was completely blown away.

They had some huge problems that really stunted their growth as a major competitor in the gaming engine market. Licensing, heavily focused on pretty graphics, difficult to run on even high-end hardware without extensive reworking by developers, and the sheer difficulty of programming made it an engine no one wanted to develop for. Only recently with CryEngine3 did these issues start to be addressed and the developers using it now verify the changes.

Unfortunately they are a consequence of the infamous Graphics Wars, where games on the PC started to focus on fancy graphics with half-assed or no storyline, and incredibly predictable multi-player which lasted up until 2008. Shifted a lot of people and the industry to consoles (along with "piracy") and the engine was basically useless at that point. Epic was leading the engine front in all areas even though they were graphically inferior to CryEngine. However, id Software and Epic did one thing that was crucially different throughout their history that made them stand out. They always focused on developers, modders, level designers, and just a plethora of tools from the beginning. Crytek blew all of that off until recently. Note how idTech 5 has become a failure. Developer support and tools flat out suck and were delayed, licensing is locked down, etc.

The industry now finds this attitude unacceptable.
 
KENNYB said:
Imagine CoD or Halo with Crisis-type graphics.
Click to expand...

No thanks. Nicer graphics won't fix the played out mediocrity of those console kid favorites, nor would they appreciate the difference. It'd be like giving kids organic chicken nuggets - they could care less.
 
Liger88 said:
I think a lot of people forget how old Crytek is. Back in the day they were just a little known studio, but they've been around for quite awhile. They were so far ahead of the curve in some ways engine wise and on the graphics front. I still remember watching my buddy play FarCry only having heard about it previously, and I was completely blown away.

They had some huge problems that really stunted their growth as a major competitor in the gaming engine market. Licensing, heavily focused on pretty graphics, difficult to run on even high-end hardware without extensive reworking by developers, and the sheer difficulty of programming made it an engine no one wanted to develop for. Only recently with CryEngine3 did these issues start to be addressed and the developers using it now verify the changes.

Unfortunately they are a consequence of the infamous Graphics Wars, where games on the PC started to focus on fancy graphics with half-assed or no storyline, and incredibly predictable multi-player which lasted up until 2008. Shifted a lot of people and the industry to consoles (along with "piracy") and the engine was basically useless at that point. Epic was leading the engine front in all areas even though they were graphically inferior to CryEngine. However, id Software and Epic did one thing that was crucially different throughout their history that made them stand out. They always focused on developers, modders, level designers, and just a plethora of tools from the beginning. Crytek blew all of that off until recently. Note how idTech 5 has become a failure. Developer support and tools flat out suck and were delayed, licensing is locked down, etc.

The industry now finds this attitude unacceptable.
Click to expand...

Crytek did have the tools for developers, but didn't give them to the modding community. Once again, this is a timing issue. It was around the time Far Cry came out that companies were starting to lock down their games from the modding community.

As far as graphics, these companies have always been about pushing the envelope. A key difference though, and once again this comes down to timing, is that Quake and Unreal showed something to customers that they've never seen before. Sure, Far Cry looked amazing for it's time, but it was an evolutionary wow factor for gamers, and not a revolutionary wow factor.

With the cost of development skyrocketing, I really wonder if we'll ever see another revolution in graphics from an unheard of small company,
 
Ugghh hope not wargaming buys them, hate that company :( rather see ubisoft, ea or valve but that aint gonna happen.. bah...
 
Mortuus said:
Ugghh hope not wargaming buys them, hate that company :( rather see ubisoft, ea or valve but that aint gonna happen.. bah...
Click to expand...

You cannot possibly be serious.
How's Wargaming even in the same universe as Ubi/EA when it comes to shafting PC gamers?
 
Thuleman said:
You cannot possibly be serious.
How's Wargaming even in the same universe as Ubi/EA when it comes to shafting PC gamers?
Click to expand...

For as much hate as the major publishers get around here, if you think about what games we'd have without them, we'd be in serious trouble. I'll gladly pay $60 for assassins creed and have to play it through UPlay than a crappy f2p war gaming game.
 
RamonGTP said:
For as much hate as the major publishers get around here, if you think about what games we'd have without them, we'd be in serious trouble. I'll gladly pay $60 for assassins creed and have to play it through UPlay than a crappy f2p war gaming game.
Click to expand...

You mean that Wargaming game that time and again sets highest concurrent player per server cluster world records?

Apart from that though, if someone doesn't like a certain game that's one thing, saying that the publisher of that game is worse than Ubi/EA is another thing. One of those things is reasonable, the other not so much.

Wargaming hasn't done any of the shit Ubi/EA routinely pull on PC gamers (i.e. crappy console ports, Day 1 DLC, retarded talk about piracy when sales numbers are not good, etc. etc.).
 
Thuleman said:
You mean that Wargaming game that time and again sets highest concurrent player per server cluster world records?

Apart from that though, if someone doesn't like a certain game that's one thing, saying that the publisher of that game is worse than Ubi/EA is another thing. One of those things is reasonable, the other not so much.

Wargaming hasn't done any of the shit Ubi/EA routinely pull on PC gamers (i.e. crappy console ports, Day 1 DLC, retarded talk about piracy when sales numbers are not good, etc. etc.).
Click to expand...

That isn't saying much for games that cost nothing to get into.
 
DPI said:
No thanks. Nicer graphics won't fix the played out mediocrity of those console kid favorites, nor would they appreciate the difference. It'd be like giving kids organic chicken nuggets - they could care less.
Click to expand...

cod is played out. halo isn't. if halo 3 came out on pc it'd probably still be one of the biggest multiplayer games around. so much fun. shame my only multiplayer experiences were either on lan or that one match i played when i had free xbox live and our 360 wasn't completely covered in dust.

Tudz said:
I always felt Crysis 1 was a mediocre game in the very nice looking wrapping... assuming you had a monster rig to play it at high settings. If you didn't, it also looked pretty mediocre at lower settings. I remember feeling COD4 looked better on my system at 40-60fps than whatever setting I ended up feeling happy with in Crysis 1 which wasn't a tremendously low end rig (I think that was back when I had the 8800GTS)..
Click to expand...

i was perfectly content playing the game on high settings, 1440x900, at 20 fps with my 9800 gt. cod4 looked good but i really don't think the two are comparable. crysis was interactive, cod4 wasn't, and crysis' levels were huge, cod4's weren't. crysis is a great game to me because they give you these giant maps, tell you to go to a certain point, and that's that. you can approach the mission however you want. that, coupled with the incredible graphics, relatively polished gunplay, and nanosuit gimmick, is what made crysis for me. i still go back and replay it now and then. it's just too much fun slowly creeping through the forest, taking guys out one by one, then grabbing the last one and maximum strength throwing him off a cliff or into a building, then tossing a grenade in the building and watching it blow apart. it's pretty sad that there are games, seven years later, still being released that don't have graphics as good as crysis.
 
Last edited:
Odellus said:
cod is played out. halo isn't. if halo 3 came out on pc it'd probably still be one of the biggest multiplayer games around. so much fun. shame my only multiplayer experiences were either on lan or that one match i played when i had free xbox live and our 360 wasn't completely covered in dust.



i was perfectly content playing the game on high settings, 1440x900, at 20 fps with my 9800 gt. cod4 looked good but i really don't think the two are comparable. crysis was interactive, cod4 wasn't, and crysis' levels were huge, cod4's weren't. crysis is a great game to me because they give you these giant maps, tell you to go to a certain point, and that's that. you can approach the mission however you want. that, coupled with the incredible graphics, relatively polished gunplay, and nanosuit gimmick, is what made crysis for me. i still go back and replay it now and then. it's just too much fun slowly creeping through the forest, taking guys out one by one, then grabbing the last one and maximum strength throwing him off a cliff or into a building, then tossing a grenade in the building and watching it blow apart. it's pretty sad that there are games, seven years later, still being released that don't have graphics as good as crysis.
Click to expand...

I agree with everything you said, but... I just didn't have fun with Crysis. It didn't have any emotional impact. Before I was married I would marathon finish old games like Far Cry, FEAR, and CoD. I've never felt the need to do the same with Crysis.
 
I play Crysis 3 now and I think it is a great looking shooter with perfect mechanics :)
 
Last edited:
Thuleman said:
They will be bought by Ubi or EA, which will then swiftly "re-negotiate" the terms under which Star Citizen can use the engine. Interesting times ahead for sure.
Click to expand...

There is no reason for either of them to pick up Crytek really. EA already has Frostbite that they use for all internal projects, they have no need for another engine. Ubi already has Far Fry, what use is there for other arguably less popular FPS franchises? I could see EA trying to buy Crysis off of Crytek, but not the company itself. Wargamming or some Chinese free-to-play company are the likely bets. I'm not sure how much money they have but maybe Nordic Games as well?
 
Odellus said:
i was perfectly content playing the game on high settings, 1440x900, at 20 fps with my 9800 gt. cod4 looked good but i really don't think the two are comparable. crysis was interactive, cod4 wasn't, and crysis' levels were huge, cod4's weren't. crysis is a great game to me because they give you these giant maps, tell you to go to a certain point, and that's that. you can approach the mission however you want. that, coupled with the incredible graphics, relatively polished gunplay, and nanosuit gimmick, is what made crysis for me. i still go back and replay it now and then. it's just too much fun slowly creeping through the forest, taking guys out one by one, then grabbing the last one and maximum strength throwing him off a cliff or into a building, then tossing a grenade in the building and watching it blow apart. it's pretty sad that there are games, seven years later, still being released that don't have graphics as good as crysis.
Click to expand...
Yeah there's no way I could play Crysis 1 at 20fps. With my 8800GTS I was playing with a config that put me somewhere between medium and high at native resolution (1680x1050) and I thought it looked mediocre and it was just a bit over 30fps (so still far from smooth). It was certainly doing more than COD4 as trying to do... but that is kind of meaningless to me if all those things don't dovetail nicely. Even at high settings I wasn't blown away by Crysis 1, Very High looked awesome and was ahead of it's time, but IMO they didn't put enough effort in to making it scale down well (as evidenced by the plethora of configs that made it look better with minimal performance loss, I never found any config I was happy with though). It also was horribly inconsistent with its graphics, occasionally you'd just encounter ugly arse textures or things that just looked out of place. To a large extent, graphics are only as good as your weakest link, so if you have a few ugly textures among your awesome ones it really brings the graphics quality down for me.

Crysis Warhead scaled much better to lower end hardware, except one thing I hated about the graphics on Warhead was there seemed to be some weird filters that just made the game look unnatural.

KENNYB said:
I agree with everything you said, but... I just didn't have fun with Crysis. It didn't have any emotional impact. Before I was married I would marathon finish old games like Far Cry, FEAR, and CoD. I've never felt the need to do the same with Crysis.
Click to expand...

I install Crysis from time to time to test new systems or to test an overclock. I usually play the first few missions then get bored, lol.
 
It's pretty fitting that the company that lambasted the PC community for "hurr piracy" is getting sunk by its overinvestment and subsequent flop in the console market.

Good riddance, Crybabytek.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top