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Crytek Closing Five Studios, Will Refocus On 'Premium IPs' and CryEngine (polygon.com) 54

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."
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Crytek Closing Five Studios, Will Refocus On 'Premium IPs' and CryEngine

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  • Well, DUH (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @02:26AM (#53528267)

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

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 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

      • 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.

      • 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.
    • by zuxun ( 4595339 )
      Nobody was actually buying that game called crysis that no gpu could run.
  • Obvious (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sartr ( 4784565 )
    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.
    • 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.

      • by murdocj ( 543661 )

        Playing as a dino sounds pretty cool.

      • by Calydor ( 739835 )

        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.

    • Ark: Survival Evolved is already out there.

    • 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.

  • Selling (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @03:57AM (#53528449) Homepage

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

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

    • by Anonymous Coward

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

  • 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.

    • by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @05:52AM (#53528643) Journal
      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.
    • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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.
  • 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.

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