Crytek Closing Five Studios, Will Refocus On 'Premium IPs' and CryEngine (polygon.com)

In a press release, Crytek, the developer behind hits such as the Crysis and Far Cry shooters, announced that it will be closing five of its studios in an effort to "refocus on its core strengths." The only studios remaining will be Crytek's Frankfurt, Germany and Kiev, Ukraine locations. Polygon reports: Other than Crytek's Frankfurt headquarters and Kiev studio, which develops free-to-play shooter Warface, the company held offices in Budapest, Hungary; Sofia, Bulgaria; Seoul, Korea; Shanghai, China; and Istanbul, Turkey. Crytek's co-founder and managing director, Avni Yerli, said in the release that the "changes are part of the essential steps we are taking to ensure Crytek is a healthy and sustainable business moving forward that can continue to attract and nurture our industry's top talent. The reasons for this have been communicated internally along the way. "Our focus now lies entirely on the core strengths that have always defined Crytek -- world-class developers, state-of-the-art technology and innovative game development, and we believe that going through this challenging process will make us a more agile, viable, and attractive studio, primed for future success," he added. The studio will now focus on its CryEngine technology, which is used by many other developers and licensors. Crytek said it will also continue to "develop and work on premium IPs."

Comments

Well, DUH

[dnaumov]

They had how many studios against the backdrop of having how many money-making projects? What did anyone expect to happen?

Re:Well, DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only natural for companies to refocus their activities every 10 years or so. Bloat tends to sneak in and the organization starts to slowly turn into a supermarket – something for everyone. Sometimes you may find your business' core outside what everyone thought was your core business. Think for example Nokia who even themselves thought they were a mobile phone manufacturing company. They had over the years, however, accumulated an insane amount of mobile network IP and were excelling in this area without realizing it. After the Elop episode they had to rethink their whole business model and as it happened, they found themselves in the mobile network business and are pulling in record profits.

Re:Well, DUH

[zuxun]

Nobody was actually buying that game called crysis that no gpu could run.

Re:Well, DUH

[johannesg]

I understood one of the reasons why Crytek is failing is because it did what Turkish businesses often do: it appointed family members throughout the business, without ever asking if they have something useful to add to the business itself. Turns out you can only carry so much ballast before the ship goes under...

Oh, and they only made the first Far Cry; later versions came from Ubisoft.

Re: Well, DUH

[zlives]

we call them organizations or syndicates

Re: Well, DUH

[CalebBegly]

The first one was awesome. Crysis 2 was also super fun, and had a ton of story. Crysis 3 was a blast, but it was way too short. Bottomline, sometimes engine demos can be incredible games (for example, half life as well).

Re:Well, DUH

[lgw]

You'd think the foliage would make good cover, but nope, no stealth mechanics whatsoever.

Ah, that's wasn't true even in FarCry, though it wasn't obvious how to hide. Certain kinds of bushes were 100% concealment -- enemies cloud actually bump into you and start pushing you without seeing you -- all the others were 0% concealment. Once you discivered the 2 kinds of bushes you could actually hide in, it was a much more fun game.

The original FarCry was a lot of fun, with a lot of room for beating levels in unusual ways. Crysis was more constrained. The other games (all made by Ubisoft?) were just bland shooters, IMO.

Obvious

[Sartr]

Look, just put some dinosaurs into Far Cry. That's all I need. I'll buy 10 copies. You made "Far Cry Primal" which was on the right track, but then you stopped short. Load that thing up with dinosaurs. Tons of them. Make the Jurassic Park game that we've wanted since Trespasser was a train wreck.

Re:Obvious

[Krakadoom]

I can't actually tell if you're kidding or not, but I would probably buy a decent physics enabled game stuffed with dinosaurs. Problem is, you'd have to be playing a dinosaur too, right? At least not a human.

Re:Obvious

[murdocj]

Playing as a dino sounds pretty cool.

Re:Obvious

[war4peace]

Ark: Survival Evolved is already out there.

Re:Obvious

[Calydor]

So you wouldn't be playing an RPG where the Tyrannosaur is the heavy melee tank class, the Velociraptor is the speedy rogue equivalent, that spitting dinosaur I can't recall the name of from the first Jurassic Park movie as the ranger and so on?

Holy crap I'd pledge the hell out of that on Kickstarter.

Re:Obvious

[ckatko]

I played and beat Trespassor. I still loved it. Imagine it today with an Oculus Rift.

Sure, it didn't live up to it's potential AT ALL. But it had more gameplay than many games I never enjoyed enough to beat. It had basic physics puzzles long before most (all?) FPS games did.

Re: Obvious

[H0p313ss]

And Nazis. Dinosaurs and Nazis and zombies.

And zeppelins...

Take my money

Selling

[mwvdlee]

make us a more agile, viable, and attractive studio, primed for future success

In other words; the owners want to sell the company.

Re:Selling

[Anonymous Coward]

No.. people like to work where they live, close to family. Most people would prefer not to relocate, they only do so to chase opportunity. Relocation is not something people do lightly. The pros/cons are weighed up.

Yep, only the foolish and the desperate move without having a really good job offer in place and knowing what alternatives they'll have in that area if that one company doesn't work out for them.

I've seen a lot of companies who used to focus divisions in various offices, largely because the managers of those groups like having their entire empire under one roof. The are starting to be forced by upper management to learn how to manage workers in other offices because the company keeps running into cases like "gee, that is a tempting job offer but I don't want to move to your Kansas City location when you already have an office right here near where I already live. Why the heck can't I just do the job from here? No? Ok then I'll pass on this one."

Re:Selling

[Anonymous Coward]

Either that, or they're gonna lawyer-up, & start lobbin' sueballs.

Core Strengths

[easyTree]

http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-...

Why so many studios?

[Diac]

I was wondering what where the studios that are shutting down developing?

For having so many studios I have not heard about many games that crytek where making.

Also can someone tell me the CryEngine the article is talking about that is part of there core strength is that still the same CryEngine that Crysis ran on back in 2007? Not exactly state of the art now is it.

Re:Why so many studios?

[RogueyWon]

The current CryEngine is not the one that powered Crysis back in 2007. Like "idTech", "CryEngine" is sometimes used as a generic term for a family of engines that has evolved over time. Crytek's "core" business model has involved quite a lot of licensing of its CryEngine technologies to third parties for them to build games on; much like the id model. There's a handy list of which games have run on which generations of CryEngine technology over at Wikipedia.

Crytek's challenge has, to some extent, been that while their engine (across successive generation) can be used to produce visually stunning results, it can be notoriously difficult to optimise for performance, particularly on console hardware. This year's Homefront: The Revolution (partly developed by Crytek before the IP was sold to Deep Silver) was an absolute dog in performance terms on consoles (and only moderately better on a high-end PC) and received a critical slating at least partly as a result. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture also had some eye-wateringly poor performance on PS4, though for genre-reasons, this mattered less than it would with an action game.

The Dunia engine used by Ubisoft (who acquired a lot of Crytek assets after they published the original Far Cry) to power the Far Cry sequels is a distant fork of the first-generation Crytek engine, though it has diverged so far over time that the two have only a very loose relationship indeed these days.

Re:Why so many studios?

[Maritz]

It's really weird that you would assume, or even consider likely, that by "CryEngine" they mean the 2007 product. No. They mean a current iteration. They are still in the business of licensing their engine to companies who actually make compelling games instead of tech demos.

Marketing speak

[CptLoRes]

Do management types actually think that using marketing speak makes a positive impression on people?

Crywho?

[mjwx]

Oh, yeah, that company that made a bit of noise back in the mid 00's, decided to consolise and hasn't done anything of note since.

Colour me surprised that they're going out of business.

They did not pay their worker

[aepervius]

A refocus is normal. A dont'-pay-your-worker-for-month is not. The problem is that they went too big too quick, and did have nothing to show for it.

Bigger issue

[Chewbacon]

Read this same story yesterday except the source reported they're also not paying their employees. Some just got paid for the month of October.

Re:Premium IPs

[ewhac]

*snerk* Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. But Star Citizen, while it uses the Crytek 3 engine, is a third-party project (mis-)managed by Roberts Space Industries/Cloud Imperium Gaming. Given what they have to show for USD$130 million and five years of work, Crytek would be insane to bring it in-house.