Crytek Having Payroll Issues Again?

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According to this article, Crytek is once again having payroll issues. Some employees are saying pay has been late every month for the past few months, others say they haven't been paid for more than a month. Not the best way to spend the holidays. :(

A person saying he is a current full-time employee contacted Polygon to say that Crytek employees have not been paid for two months, and in the preceding five, pay had been regularly delayed by two to four weeks. Polygon has reached out to a U.S.-based representative of Crytek, which is headquartered in Germany, for a statement about the allegations.
 
At this point why does anyone work for Crytek? From what I've heard the working conditions are horrible and if they can't even pay you consistently why would you put up with it? The only people making any money at the company are the executives.
 
THIS... If youre a programmer for crytek, you have enough experience to apply for a job elsewhere.
 
Not much good coming from their game studio after the first Crysis game. I did enjoy Crysis 2 & 3 but they weren't as good or fun.
 
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dark_reign said:
Not much good coming from their game studio after the first Crysis game. I did enjoy Crysis 2 & 3 but they weren't as good or fun.
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I still fire up the first Crysis (and Warhead) from time to time because I love the "open" feel of the missions, don't care which way you get there or how you get it done, totally up to the player. Crysis 2 felt more like a rail shooter, never bought 3.
 
Gweenz said:
I still fire up the first Crysis (and Warhead) from time to time because I love the "open" feel of the missions, don't care which way you get there or how you get it done, totally up to the player. Crysis 2 felt more like a rail shooter, never bought 3.
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Crysis was good until the aliens showed up.
 
Just the regular economics of the gaming industry. Despite gamers complaining about prices of games, if you're in that industry, it's not exactly an industry known for financial stability (or job security). Oh, but they sell more now with a larger audience! Yeah, but most games still don't turn a profit. And no one wants to work for less, when they could earn far more in other industries. Costs have to be cut somewhere, which is why we end up getting buggy games, and when a game makes money, well, squeeze as much out as possible, which is why we have 100 iterations of Call of Duty.
 
IcePickFreak said:
Yeah isn't Star Citizen being made with Cryengine? That should be good for another 10 years of employment before the backers start catching on. :cool:
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They played their cards right and they have basically forked it as their own engine. If something happens to CryTek it doesn't matter at all for CIG. Besides, they have already kidnapped the top guys from CryTek. :cool:
 
Crytek just got lucky and survived in the void left by ID Software, after they got distracted with RAGE for fifty billion years. Now that ID/Bethesda (whatever the fuck their name is now) is less distracted with their console fetish, we can get back to FPS with the same old questionable content depth, but fantastic mechanics, like Doom.

There was nothing special about the Crytek engine or their games. I still regret paying money for Crysis 3, and will never again give them my money.
 
Still play some games that use the engine, but as far as games by them, only one is occasionally Warface. Not gonna be a huge void if they go.
 
Most studios looking for an engine look at ue4, unity, hero engine, or crytek. The rest either build there own based on what they learn using those or build from the direct x api and network code. The things that mostly make up a game engine are the way that the assets are integrated into a database.

In theory you could turn something like mysql into a back end for a Direct X api based render client. Anyone who licenses the unreal engine get access to the source code under license. So crytek licenses their engine to free to play games that don't have the revenue stream that subscription model games do. For perspective wow was written at blizzard is written in parallel to things like the unreal engine so many companies can afford to pay programers who can do that or pay some part of the money set aside for developing the render engine and network code to pay a company for a system they then have to pay people to turn it from a first person shooter to something that has inventory. When turbine was building the LOTRO they worked with epic to fine tune their code of UE2.5 and had to build on top of it and halfway through had to dump large sections of code because the underlaying UE3.0 plus some section of code was much better than what they had with a mix of UE2.5 and custom code. Some of the assets were tossed because in UE3.0 they no longer looked good enough.

So most of the time with games taking four to five years to build if the engine has trouble targeting where the base line computers will be in four years, many companies find themselves hiring the programmers in house to be able to update the engine as technology marches on. I remember when the first crysis game came out at that point in time is one was the coolest looking engines you could get because it was the first to use layer based rendering. You could get closer to what film companies expect in set extensions. The biggest problem is then when the textures look real and the characters still look like plastic toons...

So it is always a trade off of what engine can do and what most of the target spec can show on the screen. It is the big difference between engineering and the transition to pure visualization. If you build something to work in the real world, you can not fudge the light sources because they look fake. The more you require it to be as close to real life the more the physics get easier but the harder to add in drama and mood lights to accent the good parts of the cg and hide the parts that distract.

RSI seems to be targeting the holly wood level where you scan real objects see how they work and then build cg that has the correct edgeflow and modeling processes for iges/step models so that when you use light that mimics real light you don't have to figure it what it looks weird because it looks go on any surfaces that acts like a real world object. So the code base that started as crytek clearly can be brought to the level but if crytek can not pay their workers, it is very hard to motivate them.

I do snicker everyone someone makes a comment about expensive cars. One selling it to on a short notice means one the company looks worse off than before, two the money they get might not go far enough as they might only get so much for it as well as having to buy something that still looks decent so that the company does not look as if they have no money to the investors. It is why in the USA even people that declare bank get to keep one house and one car... not sure about Germanic law but while it might not help the guys and gals who are missing a pay check if their company goes under because the investors get spooked... the company usually ends up failing or laying off people in retaliation for spooking the investors but the managers will never say that. In the USA that is illegal but it still happens. Basically if you are not getting paid it is better to talk to someone while that is happening before creative accounting can happen. My guess is that crytek is trying to end the relationships that are costing more than they are bringing in so they can try and get their engine to offer more to game companies but they had to compete with unity and UE4 as the two companies that people turn to. Most artists starting out know they can download those sdk and build test levels and games on them without trying to figure out cost models and so forth. With crytek they have a huge legal agreement and upfront cost to try out the engine. That works great if you know how it works you can cost how much work you need done and a bunch of other numbers that without getting your hand on the engine are pointless to guess at. When I licensed UE4 as indie dev I could go through the source code and see what did what I needed it to do and what did not. I could see what the models that rendered great in mental ray looked like in the engine. With unity the engine is more designed to steam an image than a three dimensional room, like other engines but since your monitor screen is flat it still works. With crytek you have to start loading a bunch of extra stuff outside the engine that I simply went back to working in the engines I was familiar with. Sure I have a license I bought as a joke, but to download the code you have install a download client, you can reverse engineer it to see what it does on a virtual client but it is extra steps that seem well a lot of effort for very little return if you can turn to two other clients and skip that step.

Most companies don't want the liability of a root kit installed so they build their version of the client server software themselves. All of them game engines are built in c++ because if you use the windows installer you can simply tell windows that some random extension is data file or executable file. Unreal does this internally some IDE use the msi format to set it up, some use both internal referencing and external so they can use shifted bit files, with headers as the first parts of the file to encrypt them. The point is when building a game you are tying get as much power to the wheels and over head that does not help what is on the screen look the best, including movement, inventory, lighting, etc..., is more of reason to go with the best starting point to creating the vision the owner or shareholders want. Most companies appoint a CEO who makes sure every part of the company is moving toward making money and a product with an appealing image. Game companies pay directors to say this is how to do it, be it technical or visual. Like having someone say that shade of green is going to make people puke. or that shade is used in hospitals to hide blood, use it areas of calm and a light blue in areas where the dark red needs to stand out the most. You need both but the point of a prebuilt game engine is so that you can toss assets in it, and see if they work they why you think they are going to, based on the program you created them in. Meaning you toss 3D Max objects in UE4 with the importer or shotgun you get close to what you expect most of the time if they were built for motion. Some times you get issues when you build for visualization and toss it in a game engine and the engine renders based on the points not the software's idea of where the flat surfaces would be. You toss content that is ready based on the verts it may still do something funny and if the assets are fine a coder has to look through the code and fix what ever is glitching. It might be code in the engine where the comma is one place over, it might be code referencing something externally that you don't plan to use.

The point is that the engine really needs to show case what it can do out of the box and the best example lately is really forked code at this point because so much had to be changed. From the thing on steam apparently it is still true if you replace the code with new code you shrug and move on with out the legal battle impacting your ability to generate revenue and both pay your employees and defend yourself in court. So crytek really needs to find a triple a level company that has the artists and programs to take their engine and build a role playing mmo off it or people are going to see only free to play level design. There are free to play games that built to the tripple A level but they all have cash shops that cost more to play with that stuff than you spend in a year paying for a subscription. which is cool you only pay for what you want but it gets expensive. BDO and GW2 come to mind. Both cool games but if you don't budget yourself their cash shops can cost far more than a normal mmo that uses sub fees to pay the basic overhead. Or start developing and show casing things that are not in UE4 or Unity.
 
^^Mitä helvettiä...? I lost it after the first few lines.
 
Drakken practicing to write a book?

Sad that they have not got paid. How long do you continue to work with no pay??
 
If the company misses payroll and doesn't make it up within a week, look for another job. With luck you'll find one OR they'll get around to paying you. I'd NEVER stay anywhere that couldn't pay me. There are plenty of places hiring all sorts of development jobs.
 
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