Crytek USA Collapses, Sells Game IP To Other Developers

MojoKid (1002251) writes Game developer Crytek's problems have been detailed recently from various sources, and it's now clear that it wasn't just the company's UK studios that were affected. Crytek announced today that it has officially moved development of its F2P shooter Hunt: Horrors of the Guilded Age to a German developer, ignoring the fact that the majority of the US team had apparently already quit the company. The problem? Just as in the UK, the US employees weren't getting paid. In a separate announcement, Crytek also declared that development of the Homefront series had passed entirely to developer Deep Silver. The company has stated, "On completion of the proposed acquisition, the Homefront team from Crytek's Nottingham studio would transfer their talents to Koch Media in compliance with English law and continue their hard work on upcoming shooter, Homefront: The Revolution. Both parties hope to finalize and implement a deal soon." It's hard to see this as good news for Crytek. The company can make all the noise it wants about moving from a development studio to a publisher model, but Crytek as a company was always known for two things — the CryEngine itself, adapted for a handful of titles and the Crysis series. Without those factors, what's left?

Comments

Awkward

[Sockatume]

I was reading last month's Edge, and it had a studio profile with Crytek UK that was written and published just before the word of non-payment started coming out. The angle of the piece was all "Free Radical had an awful experience, David Doak had a nervous breakdown and quit, but things are okay now" which was kind of heartbreaking to read.

Re:Awkward

[timrod]

It's not really surprising (to me, anyway) that Crytek is failing as a publisher. Homefront was the most generic FPS ever made. It didn't sell, and the reviewers barely had anything at all to say about it - though what little did come out essentially boiled down to it being a really mediocre game that was essentially the product of a marketing team (who saw Call of Duty and Battlefield and wanted a piece of that action) rather than people trying to make a good game. The same thing goes for Crysis, which was basically a graphics benchmark in the guise of a game (to this day, I've never heard anyone talk about Crysis outside of using it as a benchmark).

The only people I really feel sorry for are Free Radical - I know they had a Kickstarter up at one point to get a new TimeSplitters out on Steam, and I think it got funded, but I don't know if it's coming out now. If they're still making it I hope they find someone else to publish it or self-publish.

Re:Awkward

[RogueyWon]

The first Homefront game was nothing to do with Crytek. It was developed by Kaos and published by THQ. Crytek merely bought up the rights to do the sequel. For the record, I bought and played through Homefront on PC. It was basically a mediocre and generic shooter based on top of some really interesting fiction. In the right hands, it could have been a much better game.

And there are lots of people - self included - who will sing the praises of the original Crysis as a game rather than a tech demo. It's much smarter than the average shooter, with plenty of room for exploration and taking different approaches. There are few other shooters that permit the sheer on-the-fly tactical flexibility that came from Crysis's nanosuit.

The game did make a few mis-steps - the quality notably dives in the final 25% or so of the campaign, once the aliens show up (the floaty section in the alien mothership in particular goes on for far too long). But overall, it is an excellent shooter which has stood the test of time far better than most others in its genre.

Crysis 2, on the other hand, was crap. And Crysis 3 had a few moments where it was pretty good (mostly in the more open sections near the end of the game) but ultimately disappoints.

Re:Awkward

[Andy Dodd]

The single-player campaign in Crysis was great, I loved it.

The multiplayer utterly sucked. Crytek screwed up one of the fundamental tenets of multiplayer gaming - NEVER TRUST THE FUCKING CLIENT.

Crytek did stupid shit like offload physics calculations to clients (which is why some matches were "DX10-only"), and also have clients do damage calculations.

e.g. if the client said "I fired a pistol bullet and it did 99999999 damage before resists" - well, you'd have an instakill pistol. (This could be achieved by editing an XML). Similarly, armor resists were calculated ON THE CLIENT TAKING DAMAGE - so if you had a vehicle with 99% resistance to all damage types, you were effectively invincible.

My multiplayer experience in Crysis was something like:
1 week of playing legitimately - constantly getting my ass kicked by obvious cheaters
1 week of trying to see what level of cheating I could get away with without people accusing me of cheating - it was shocking how far I could go in this regard (50% damage boosts to everything, no assault rifle bullet spread, 1000 horsepower pickup trucks, AA cannons that could depress their turrets by 30 degrees) without getting noticed because of the attention blatant cheaters received. Even with this, it was only a matter of time in every single game before a blatant cheater would instapistol their way to an attack helicopter with 99% resistance to all damage types and amped-up missile damage.
After that I quit.

following this to its logical conclusion

[nimbius]

now crytek cant even run crysis.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[ledow]

It was common in the 80's with software houses, looks like people don't learn.

Sure, I'm willing to help out a company I work for that is struggling - that's only sensible self-preservation. But if you miss a single payment, and generally people are paid a month in arrears at least - then it means that I've worked a month "for free" already. If you didn't bother to notify me, I'm out the door straight away and will take you to court for that unpaid month.

If you came and said "We can't pay you this month", I'd want to be privy to the expense accounts and financial arrangements that make it impossible to pay me. If you don't want to share those with me, I'm out of the door - and will assume it's because you've creamed off and are trying to not pay me, so will still sue.

If you share those with me, and I believe that money is coming soon, there's a small possibility - in a firm that I really love and trust - that I might continue for that one month. And then that's it.

Sorry, but you're not asking a personal favour, you're not being a friend, you're not helping me at all by forcibly stopping me paying my household bills for a month. I wouldn't ask that of my closest friend or family. For a company I work for? I'm out of there.

Someone, somewhere, will be a willing scapegoat - no doubt - especially if you promise them shares, an executive title, etc. even if it's only going to last a month before they are up before a court explaining why they're the one holding the hot potato.

A company that cannot pay salary is dead in the water. It will probably never recover. And an employee working for that company is stupid to think otherwise.

Maybe, if it was a family business, and a close member of family ran it, and I was privy to all the information, and I genuinely believed there could be no doubt about the money arriving, and I've been kept in the loop at all points, and it doesn't go on more than one month. Anything else? Bye...

Re: What do do now...

[DigiShaman]

Which one? Star Citizen will be using the latest and is already crowd funded below 49 million so far. This game could the largest PC title next to Eve Online.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[stjobe]

Is it a common thing for employees to stick around when they're not getting paid?

In countries with stronger employee protection than the US, yes.
The company failing to provide pay is not an implicit termination of the employment contract, leaving or not working is.

How often do companies recover from a situation where they're unable to pay salaries for a period of time?

Quite common where I'm from (EU). The company I'm currently working for had to go through reconstruction four years ago; for three months the government paid our salaries while the company negotiated with their debtors to cancel or reduce their debt. In the end we lost about 25% of our employees (some people left voluntarily, some were let go), but the company survived and have been in the black since. In fact, last year was a record year for us; best financial result in the company's history.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[CanHasDIY]

This, a thousand times over.

Your employer is not, in most cases, your friend. They are an entity that you have contracted with to exchange labor for money, and if they fail to meet their end of the contract, you'd be a moron* for continuing to work for them.

* Yes, there are exceptions, but they are rare.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[Noah Haders]

you should only do this if you yell out "yoink!"

Re:Not Getting Paid

[am 2k]

Your employer is not, in most cases, your friend.

Your employer is never your friend. If you have a friend you also do business with, you have to separate those affairs, otherwise it can get very problematic. I know someone who doesn't speak to his own brother any more, because they had a company together that went bad.

schadenfreude

[Schnapple]

As much as I like the Crysis games and Crytek's work in general, I've got a little schadenfreude going on because they were kinda pretentious dicks a few years back when they switched to console development.

For a recap: they came out with Crysis (the first one) in 2007, and it didn't sell as much as they wanted it to. They blamed piracy. I'm sure the game was pirated, probably a lot, but I don't think that's why it wasn't selling like they wanted it to. It wasn't selling like they wanted it to because it was released at a time when PC's weren't powerful enough to run it. By which I mean, in 2007 when it launched it was literally impossible to run it at the best settings. Like, it was impossible to build a PC that could run it at max settings at a high resolution at a high framerate.

And people knew this because they released a demo. You got a first hand look at how this game was going to turn your PC into a slideshow. So people didn't buy the game because they knew they didn't have the pipe to smoke it. Releasing a demo probably hurt Crysis' initial sales.

And this wasn't unforeseen - in the runup to the game's release people expressed surprise that EA, who had been all about cross platform development or cutting off the PC, here they were releasing a game just for the PC which a lot of people couldn't run.

So, the game didn't sell either because of system requirements or piracy or both. And again, I'm not saying the game wasn't pirated, I'm just saying that Crytek claimed this was the only reason it wasn't selling, and in no possible way could it be linked to the fact that they released a game which just told every PC owner on earth their system wasn't good enough.

That's not the real dick part to me though. The real dick part was when the CEO said their "proof" of piracy was that the patch for the game was downloaded more times than the copies of the games that had been sold.

OK, think way back to 2007. Hard as it is to believe, Crysis wasn't on Steam. Back then it wasn't a given that your PC game would be on Steam. Consider Fallout 3 was released in 2008 on disc-only, no digital services at all, and had GFWL baked in. Two years after that Fallout: New Vegas launches as a Steamworks title on Steam on day one, no GFWL in sight. The switch was quick but in 2007 it hadn't happened yet.

So by that logic when Crytek released a patch for Crysis, people had to go manually download it. So I can see a shred of logic to the idea that if more people are downloading the patch than buying the game then some number of pirated copies are getting patched.

The thing is, the statement doesn't make sense. How many more times are we talking here? I know back then I personally downloaded the patches a few times, usually after I would format and reinstall the game (this being before Steam made that sort of unneccessary). If the patch was downloaded 10x as much then you might have a point. But how do you even know how many times it was downloaded? The file was mirrored everywhere (I think FilePlanet still existed, etc.) did you add up all the downloads? Do all those services even give download numbers? Why are you not providing more evidence for your case?

Crytek's CEO also lamented how the Call Of Duty games were selling more copies. At the time, Crysis had sold less than a million copies whereas the CoD game of the year had sold ten million. The CoD games which had the advantage of being on consoles as well. Disregarding the fact that Crysis would hit the 1M mark soon (and according to Wikipedia has sold over 3M overall as of 2010), the CoD game sold better due to better marketing and just generally being a better game.

To be fair this was that dark era in PC gaming of the console games selling 9-10x their PC counterparts, to the point where some developers wanted to drop the PC entirely. However, if Cryek wanted to get into console gaming just do it, don't give us some sort of "you're all horrible software pirates" argument on your way

Re:schadenfreude

[Sockatume]

Unfortunately the people you don't like aren't the ones getting laid off.

Business owner here

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a medium sized business between myself and my business partner. Just wanted to chime in and say the parent is 100% correct about when to leave and when to sue.

For any business of any kind, payroll is #1 priority. If you can't make payroll, you have no business and your business is on the path to bankruptcy. Please, please, please do not let any company stiff you for wages. Anyone telling you that is standard operating procedure is wrong and trying to take advantage of you.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[Dutch Gun]

Videogame development houses are not like most places, especially not the smaller, more tightly knit development houses. I suppose nowadays you'd probably call them "indie" shops. Back then, they were just called "very small game studios". Most places you go to work because you want a paycheck. Videogame developers, for the most part, go to work because they want to make cool games, and the paycheck is an important yet ultimately secondary concern. If they were more interested in the paycheck, there are lots of places you can go work a must less stressful 8 to 5 job for more money than in the videogame industry (well, certainly for programmers, at least).

I was with a very small game studio when it lost the next big project it had lined up. We were small enough that we didn't have a backup plan of any sort, unfortunately, and after about half a year or so without any projects being landed, the company inevitably ran low on funds, and employees had to go on half pay. During my time there, I became friends with my fellow employees and got along great with my bosses, who were really good to their employees and genuinely nice people. I stayed on for another couple of months, but I eventually had to look after my own financial needs, and let them know I when started searching for another job. We parted on good terms, and several months later, the company folded.

Game development teams go through a lot together, often working under very stressful conditions on very demanding products, and developers are often loathe to break up a really good team. Additionally, finding a new job is, of course, a very stressful thing. Sometimes it's just developers not wanting to face reality, or hoping things improve. I can only speak for myself, but I stayed as long as I could on half pay because I really loved working at that company. It was really as simple as that. Had we managed to land one of the deals we were desperately trying to get, who knows how things might have turned out. It seemed worth trying at the time, and I don't regret it.

Re:Not Getting Paid

[SuiteSisterMary]

You know, I've always wondered if the fact that 'only a sith deals in absolutes' line was actually intended as an indicator that the Jedi were seriously fucked in the philosophy department, or if the writers (Lucas?) just didn't realize that it was an absolute statement.