If things turn around they better pay back all unpaid salary AND bonuses for hardship. Not paying your employees is unforgivable, it's a fucking travesty that it occurs as frequently in the game industry.
In a perfect world I'd prefer to see employees sue, get their money and ruin Crytek in order to send a message that this shit will not be tolerated.
The site completely ignores the millions that Crytek has made off licensing their engine during the past couple of years. There are a lot of projects using CE3.
how many millions? just do some simple math 800 employees cost tons of money, every month even if you don't roll in cash. 800 people, i don't even want to know how much they cost :X
I could understand if they did not have the money and could not physically pay the staff however the other things I am hearing about what the management having no expenses spared has made me annoyed that this is happening.
how many millions? just do some simple math 800 employees cost tons of money, every month even if you don't roll in cash. 800 people, i don't even want to know how much they cost :X
Zero millions. I'd like to point out that Crytek is a Germany company, so their financial statements are available to anyone who wants them. Crytek have lost some $60 million over the last four years.
i'd take a guess and say that if the number of employees reported is correct burn rate should be somewhere between 3 and 5 million euros a month, depending on how cheap these eastern european studios are actually to run after all.
so gir's figure seems to fit.
so it would appear - unless these engine deals are worth multi-millions each and they get several per month - that they can not carry the company in difficult times. makes them seem more like a little extra money on the side, really.
Zero millions. I'd like to point out that Crytek is a Germany company, so their financial statements are available to anyone who wants them. Crytek have lost some $60 million over the last four years.
Theoretical Crytek must offer 2 AAA Titel per year with this manpower but the only thing we hear are free to play games.
people are exatcly the problem and you stated it yourself, it needs great sales to support such manpower. People are always the biggest factor in companies, thats why managers want to push everything to cheaper countries, to lower the costs per employee.
so they started loosing money right after diving in console development and F2P. Meanwhile CD Projekt RED managed not only survive 2007-2008 but produce their own engine, AAA-rpg with 87 MC rating which was PC exclusive by the way and make money without chasing every trend out there - multiplayer focused games, F2P, mobile, console-focused development and so on.
Yep! As you can see by those numbers, they started losing cash right after Crysis.
According to their most recent financial statement (the first that will come up in the search), their net loss at year end for 2011 was ~9.4 million and for 2012 was ~8.2 million. Hemorrhaging cash like that, they could never have lasted particularly long - but they didn't seem to do anything to combat it and even went as far as to set up MORE studios?
Maybe they fell into the baby trap? Trying to have 9 women birth a baby in 1 month? Throwing bodies at the problem when that wasn't a viable solution, in other words...
One thing you guys need to realize is that huge corporations like this can bleed money for years. They probably have investments in a lot of other areas besides just games. I also know that Crytek makes a lot of its money from military contracts.
In the end, they will probably just heavily downsize and re-structure or be bought out by a bigger (profitable) company.
They've continuously expanded by the last years, recalling acquisition of vigil, opening up new studios like İstanbul that focuses on mobile stuff. I don't think that deliberate downsizing will come any soon other than that obviously a financial crash. Crytek for sure focusing on marketing their engine in the path of epic did. Their tools not that much user friendly as their competitors so their biggest bet would be on the military area. I think the situation on the engine contracts will show the companies future.
so they started loosing money right after diving in console development and F2P. Meanwhile CD Projekt RED managed not only survive 2007-2008 but produce their own engine, AAA-rpg with 87 MC rating which was PC exclusive by the way and make money without chasing every trend out there - multiplayer focused games, F2P, mobile, console-focused development and so on.
If you're going to stay small you can afford to focus on a niche. If you're going to compare Crytek to another studio it would be their competition, Epic. They seem to have found success chasing those exact trends you mentioned. CD Projekts subsequent games haven't been PC exclusive either.
If you're going to stay small you can afford to focus on a niche. If you're going to compare Crytek to another studio it would be their competition, Epic. They seem to have found success chasing those exact trends you mentioned. CD Projekts subsequent games haven't been PC exclusive either.
In the area of Engine development yes but Epic has only 120 people (Wiki) and can maybe afford to live from the engine alone. A bad Gears of War or Unreal Tournament can be survived. Compared to Crytek Epic is the small niche but with greater success in engine licencing.
In the area of Engine development yes but Epic has only 120 people (Wiki) and can maybe afford to live from the engine alone. A bad Gears of War or Unreal Tournament can be survived. Compared to Crytek Epic is the small niche but with greater success in engine licencing.
Didn't they also sell ~40% of their shares for $300 Mio? Probably also helps.
yeah best to crytek employees, I had always thought Crytek should just buy half of Nvidia and keep pushing the envelope with graphics because they were single handedly propelling graphics cards forward for a while there
epic's tencent investment f2p might have a huge potential at ever-increasing far-eastern(chinese) market. The potential is just huge, they'll either make huge stockpiles of money or go complete wrong. Though some other huge far-eastern tech(samsung?) companies also doing their dip at the huge far-eastern f2p potential market. Alright, not far-eastern exclusive but there's things coming from the dna of the investment. New UT is complete free, this could be an indicator for epic's financial security even though only a small portion of the team working on it.
If you're going to stay small you can afford to focus on a niche. If you're going to compare Crytek to another studio it would be their competition, Epic. They seem to have found success chasing those exact trends you mentioned. CD Projekts subsequent games haven't been PC exclusive either.
Epic didn't historically chase those trends though. They were already active in the console market, with an engine and games supporting console platforms years before Crytek even shipped Far Cry. They didn't chase mobile too late either, with Infinity Blade hitting the market as one of the first 'AAA' products, just as mobile gaming started to boom. They are however perhaps playing catchup with the Free to Play market though, so we'll see how that works out..
That's an interesting quote to me. How is F2P money imaginary?
Well often time, business people get so worked up over micro transactions that they completely forget to build a game. It takes skill to make a game, but all you need is greed to start peddling the promise of f2p money to others.
Business people go down with bubbles in their mouths when they see a way to get money from people with no real product or service. So they all go " Never mind making a good game, just put micro transaction and we will be rolling in money. "
The money that is underlined above is what we call imaginary my friend.
Also sorry for the double post, but a couple of people including me at CryDev decided to take a stance and make our final voice-outs heard in a civil and creative way.
We are making a " Letter of Cry" or "CryLetter" direced to Mr Cevat Yerli.
I did call it imaginary money. Free-to-play seems to be the 'hot new thing' right now, and it can certainly be profitable, but just like the MMO market when it was the next hot new thing, the market is being perceived as much more massive than it really is. People are looking at it like it has massive untapped potential, when in reality we actually just don't know how big that market is, or how long it will last before consumers decide they're not really into it.
And just like the MMO market, you may find that it was already saturated before you made your debut (World of Warcraft versus it's numerous successors in the west last decade).
I wouldn't really call it "imaginary money" since there are a lot of benefits to F2P over other business models. One of the biggest things that makes F2P great from a business perspective is the fact that it is relatively easy to tell if a game will be successful enough or not. A studio can put out an "open beta" and see if they should continue to drop money onto a project or pull the money out and put it towards a new, potentially more successful project.
Compare that to the standard AAA model in which millions of dollars have to be spent before finding out a game failed, which would likely also result in a lot of people getting fired.
One could already call the F2P market "saturated." There are thousands of F2Ps on iOS/Android devices with more being released on what seems to be a daily occurrence. At the same time, you can still see brand new, high quality F2Ps getting released and being successful. This wasn't exactly the case with the MMO market because there were plenty of high quality MMOs coming out that still ended up getting shut down, but I think that is more related to the fact that MMOs in general encourage you to pick one and stick with it.
This isn't the case with F2P though, you don't see players "sticking" to one game, and even in the professional e-sports scene, you frequently see people hopping from game to game.
I think Crytek's main problem stems from the fact that they can't seem to make a game that actually interests people. I was excited to play Warface and have played it since the closed beta (I even played the Russian alpha) and it was a high quality game, but very few people stuck with it. While the graphics were incredible, the core gameplay mechanics were generic and there were many annoying flaws that made the game unenjoyable for many people.
I hopped on to try it again and there were only 26 people online, across both the PvP and PvE servers, and if you go on any forum that talks about the game, you always see everybody complaining about how awful the game is.
This same thing happens with other Crytek games also. Crysis 1 and 2 multiplayer died out a week after launch and Crysis 3 multiplayer was dead after the first day. I'm sure the games were profitable but you need to have people interested in multiplayer if you are going to start making some exclusive multiplayer F2Ps.
I wouldn't really call it "imaginary money" since there are a lot of benefits to F2P over other business models. One of the biggest things that makes F2P great from a business perspective is the fact that it is relatively easy to tell if a game will be successful enough or not. A studio can put out an "open beta" and see if they should continue to drop money onto a project or pull the money out and put it towards a new, potentially more successful project.
There's no difference between the two. There is no reason an 'AAA' game cannot also have betas (we do also alreayd have Early Access, Battlefield Betas, etc) and do the same. The cost of getting a game into an playable beta state is actually more expensive for a free to play game, as all that expensive back-end server infrastructure needs to be up an running in order to make the game playable - and that's a very big expense unique to F2P games.
(Your argument also makes absolutely no sense, the money was no less imaginary just because 'there are benefits of a F2P business model' - how does that even work?)
One could already call the F2P market "saturated." There are thousands of F2Ps on iOS/Android devices with more being released on what seems to be a daily occurrence. At the same time, you can still see brand new, high quality F2Ps getting released and being successful.
If games are still being released and selling, then the market isn't saturated, is it? The mobile free to play market is not the same as the PC / Console free to play market. There isn't a huge amount of crossover between the two.
This wasn't exactly the case with the MMO market because there were plenty of high quality MMOs coming out that still ended up getting shut down, but I think that is more related to the fact that MMOs in general encourage you to pick one and stick with it.
There are plenty of free to play games that have already failed on PC - Tribes: Ascend broke even, Warface failed, there are myriad others we haven't even heard of as they failed to gain any traction. Free to play games also encourage you to invest time into them - that's how they have to work in order to secure a continuous revenue stream. If they fail to do that consistently, then just like an MMO they will collapse under the weight of their own running costs.
Free to play isn't some kind of magic bullet and just a slightly different way of getting players to pay for a game. It's VERY expensive to implement - you need a big, easily expandable infrastructure ready, you need staff on hand to support it that you don't traditionally use in the games industry who come with a hefty price tag. You have to throw cash at your infrastructure and keep it running on top of developing your game, even if people are playing the game and not spending a penny.
Maybe a week was an exaggeration but there is no way there were more than maybe 200 people playing after the first month. I remember the horrible hacker epidemic that never got solved because people with pirated copies of the game could still play online with everybody else (which led to endless hacking because of zero risk.)
The same thing happened with Crysis 2 but it wasn't until version 1.9 that they stopped the pirates from playing online when they added some additional CD Key checks.
A studio can put out an "open beta" and see if they should continue to drop money onto a project or pull the money out and put it towards a new, potentially more successful project.
The difference here is that with a F2P game you can have a living project. Have you seen what PopCap is doing with Plants vs Zombies 2? It's been really amazing to watch.
Over the life of that game so far, they've completely changed the world map, how special events are done, how they do ... well, almost everything. All in response to how people are playing and what people are willing to pay for.
And the game is GREAT fun. They aren't intrusive about the microtrans but they aren't shy either. There's always stuff to spent a $1 or $2 on.
With a large AAA game, you design it and ship it ... you don't have the opportunity to mold it afterwards into something else if players don't like it.
The living project is something we're going to see more of in the future as it seems like a far less risky way to go than shooting for the moon and you either hit it or you don't.
Just saw that Warface was added to Steam today. With other F2P titles this generally means a huge boost of players for the first week, and potentially more "permanent" players, which basically equates to having a second release day if compared to non-F2P titles.
I hope this means more success for Crytek, I'll probably download the game and buy something to support them lol.
EDIT: Looks like the F2P hater tears are already readily available.
The problem is that Warface sucks (I played the beta) as have most things CryTek has put out in the last few years.
I played through Crysis 2 and beyond the shiny graphics it was a massive exercise in banality. Bought Crysis 3 for fun, same deal. Couldn't even make it past the first level I was so bored (oh hey...they have a bow!!!11). Ryse got uniformly panned.
They're failing because they make mediocre games. Poor execution. The EaaS thing is poor execution too. It comes off as mindless as the CryTek games do, just an attempt to vacuum up money with shiny graphics without offering anything of substance.
Contrast this with UE 4 which had the best execution I've seen of a new product in quite some time (well, see also Quixel and Allegorithmic).
Mediocre games? Sure, Warface isn't great, Ryse had bad gameplay I hear, but the Crysis series is solid.
Crytek has been indifferent towards indies to an almost apathetic degree though, and that is terrible. I also think that Cryengine 3 needs better documentation and better examples to be able to compete with UE4.
Mediocre games? Sure, Warface isn't great, Ryse had bad gameplay I hear, but the Crysis series is solid.
A lot of people, including myself, would disagree. I thought the gameplay in the first half of the first Crysis was mediocre but entertaining enough, then when the aliens turned up, the entire game was borderline unplayable.
The second game eschewed everything that made the first successful, and despite some positive refinements to the way the suit worked, it was just another generic as hell corridor shooter.
Didn't bother with the third part, and probably never will.
they have strange taste on gameplay, the half solid half boring design went way back in Far Cry, when mutants turned up, everything fun went down the toilet, same thing happened again in Crysis to a lesser extent, but I have to say i enjoyed playing Crysis 2 and 3 twice just because of the awesome graphics.
ps they could have done a Battlefield kind of thing back in Crysis while the engine was(and probably still is) quite capable, somehow they decided to go with the trend of Cod which now we can say didn't quite work out for both of the parties.
they have strange taste on gameplay, the half solid half boring design went way back in Far Cry, when mutants turned up, everything fun went down the toilet, same thing happened again in Crysis to a lesser extent, but I have to say i enjoyed playing Crysis 2 and 3 twice just because of the awesome graphics.
ps they could have done a Battlefield kind of thing back in Crysis while the engine was(and probably still is) quite capable, somehow they decided to go with the trend of Cod which now we can say didn't quite work out for both of the parties.
Your last point underlines what the one guy said, that they wrere hunting the trends and were always behind. Major problem for their MP was that it was so easily for cheater and hacker to attack, that it was basically dead at birth
Yikes! I'm guessing Crytek should've cut a deal with MS regarding the Ryse IP since it would've generated some salaries. Whether the game would've been made is anyone's guess.
Replies
In a perfect world I'd prefer to see employees sue, get their money and ruin Crytek in order to send a message that this shit will not be tolerated.
how many millions? just do some simple math 800 employees cost tons of money, every month even if you don't roll in cash. 800 people, i don't even want to know how much they cost :X
Zero millions. I'd like to point out that Crytek is a Germany company, so their financial statements are available to anyone who wants them. Crytek have lost some $60 million over the last four years.
so gir's figure seems to fit.
so it would appear - unless these engine deals are worth multi-millions each and they get several per month - that they can not carry the company in difficult times. makes them seem more like a little extra money on the side, really.
Theoretical Crytek must offer 2 AAA Titel per year with this manpower but the only thing we hear are free to play games.
I wonder what 2013 will look like:
But it seems they have a capital reserve of some millions. But I have no idea about controlling/accounting, so I could be wrong.
source: https://www.bundesanzeiger.de/ebanzwww/wexsservlet?session.sessionid=9a0915136251856e43b86f653b1cf643&global_data.designmode=eb&genericsearch_param.fulltext=Crytek&genericsearch_param.part_id=&%28page.navid%3Dto_quicksearchlist%29=Suchen
people are exatcly the problem and you stated it yourself, it needs great sales to support such manpower. People are always the biggest factor in companies, thats why managers want to push everything to cheaper countries, to lower the costs per employee.
so they started loosing money right after diving in console development and F2P. Meanwhile CD Projekt RED managed not only survive 2007-2008 but produce their own engine, AAA-rpg with 87 MC rating which was PC exclusive by the way and make money without chasing every trend out there - multiplayer focused games, F2P, mobile, console-focused development and so on.
According to their most recent financial statement (the first that will come up in the search), their net loss at year end for 2011 was ~9.4 million and for 2012 was ~8.2 million. Hemorrhaging cash like that, they could never have lasted particularly long - but they didn't seem to do anything to combat it and even went as far as to set up MORE studios?
Of course Deutsche Bank wouldn't like to give credit with a score like this.
In the end, they will probably just heavily downsize and re-structure or be bought out by a bigger (profitable) company.
If you're going to stay small you can afford to focus on a niche. If you're going to compare Crytek to another studio it would be their competition, Epic. They seem to have found success chasing those exact trends you mentioned. CD Projekts subsequent games haven't been PC exclusive either.
In the area of Engine development yes but Epic has only 120 people (Wiki) and can maybe afford to live from the engine alone. A bad Gears of War or Unreal Tournament can be survived. Compared to Crytek Epic is the small niche but with greater success in engine licencing.
Didn't they also sell ~40% of their shares for $300 Mio? Probably also helps.
Yeah, Tencent invested in them. That's a company that chases imaginary f2p money, they also invested a lot in Riot.
There was a rumor that Wargaming or a chinese company wanted to purchase or invest in Crytek, yet more f2p money.
Epic didn't historically chase those trends though. They were already active in the console market, with an engine and games supporting console platforms years before Crytek even shipped Far Cry. They didn't chase mobile too late either, with Infinity Blade hitting the market as one of the first 'AAA' products, just as mobile gaming started to boom. They are however perhaps playing catchup with the Free to Play market though, so we'll see how that works out..
do cry engine mobile supports lightmap?
Wrong. Tencent is huge corporation, with investments in lots of IT areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent
F2P is just one of things they are operating, and it's not even biggest one.
They literally swim in money.
Well often time, business people get so worked up over micro transactions that they completely forget to build a game. It takes skill to make a game, but all you need is greed to start peddling the promise of f2p money to others.
Business people go down with bubbles in their mouths when they see a way to get money from people with no real product or service. So they all go " Never mind making a good game, just put micro transaction and we will be rolling in money. "
The money that is underlined above is what we call imaginary my friend.
We are making a " Letter of Cry" or "CryLetter" direced to Mr Cevat Yerli.
Here are the details, if you want to check out: http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=124726&p=1223988#p1223988
ambershee called it imaginary money.
edit: removing post, just basically fed up with polycount
And just like the MMO market, you may find that it was already saturated before you made your debut (World of Warcraft versus it's numerous successors in the west last decade).
Compare that to the standard AAA model in which millions of dollars have to be spent before finding out a game failed, which would likely also result in a lot of people getting fired.
One could already call the F2P market "saturated." There are thousands of F2Ps on iOS/Android devices with more being released on what seems to be a daily occurrence. At the same time, you can still see brand new, high quality F2Ps getting released and being successful. This wasn't exactly the case with the MMO market because there were plenty of high quality MMOs coming out that still ended up getting shut down, but I think that is more related to the fact that MMOs in general encourage you to pick one and stick with it.
This isn't the case with F2P though, you don't see players "sticking" to one game, and even in the professional e-sports scene, you frequently see people hopping from game to game.
I think Crytek's main problem stems from the fact that they can't seem to make a game that actually interests people. I was excited to play Warface and have played it since the closed beta (I even played the Russian alpha) and it was a high quality game, but very few people stuck with it. While the graphics were incredible, the core gameplay mechanics were generic and there were many annoying flaws that made the game unenjoyable for many people.
I hopped on to try it again and there were only 26 people online, across both the PvP and PvE servers, and if you go on any forum that talks about the game, you always see everybody complaining about how awful the game is.
This same thing happens with other Crytek games also. Crysis 1 and 2 multiplayer died out a week after launch and Crysis 3 multiplayer was dead after the first day. I'm sure the games were profitable but you need to have people interested in multiplayer if you are going to start making some exclusive multiplayer F2Ps.
There's no difference between the two. There is no reason an 'AAA' game cannot also have betas (we do also alreayd have Early Access, Battlefield Betas, etc) and do the same. The cost of getting a game into an playable beta state is actually more expensive for a free to play game, as all that expensive back-end server infrastructure needs to be up an running in order to make the game playable - and that's a very big expense unique to F2P games.
(Your argument also makes absolutely no sense, the money was no less imaginary just because 'there are benefits of a F2P business model' - how does that even work?)
If games are still being released and selling, then the market isn't saturated, is it? The mobile free to play market is not the same as the PC / Console free to play market. There isn't a huge amount of crossover between the two.
There are plenty of free to play games that have already failed on PC - Tribes: Ascend broke even, Warface failed, there are myriad others we haven't even heard of as they failed to gain any traction. Free to play games also encourage you to invest time into them - that's how they have to work in order to secure a continuous revenue stream. If they fail to do that consistently, then just like an MMO they will collapse under the weight of their own running costs.
Free to play isn't some kind of magic bullet and just a slightly different way of getting players to pay for a game. It's VERY expensive to implement - you need a big, easily expandable infrastructure ready, you need staff on hand to support it that you don't traditionally use in the games industry who come with a hefty price tag. You have to throw cash at your infrastructure and keep it running on top of developing your game, even if people are playing the game and not spending a penny.
Sir I must prove you wrong. I played Crysis 1's multiplayer for " weeks" and it was fun and crowded as hell.
I don't know about Crysis 2-3 though.
The same thing happened with Crysis 2 but it wasn't until version 1.9 that they stopped the pirates from playing online when they added some additional CD Key checks.
Over the life of that game so far, they've completely changed the world map, how special events are done, how they do ... well, almost everything. All in response to how people are playing and what people are willing to pay for.
And the game is GREAT fun. They aren't intrusive about the microtrans but they aren't shy either. There's always stuff to spent a $1 or $2 on.
With a large AAA game, you design it and ship it ... you don't have the opportunity to mold it afterwards into something else if players don't like it.
The living project is something we're going to see more of in the future as it seems like a far less risky way to go than shooting for the moon and you either hit it or you don't.
I hope this means more success for Crytek, I'll probably download the game and buy something to support them lol.
EDIT: Looks like the F2P hater tears are already readily available.
I played through Crysis 2 and beyond the shiny graphics it was a massive exercise in banality. Bought Crysis 3 for fun, same deal. Couldn't even make it past the first level I was so bored (oh hey...they have a bow!!!11). Ryse got uniformly panned.
They're failing because they make mediocre games. Poor execution. The EaaS thing is poor execution too. It comes off as mindless as the CryTek games do, just an attempt to vacuum up money with shiny graphics without offering anything of substance.
Contrast this with UE 4 which had the best execution I've seen of a new product in quite some time (well, see also Quixel and Allegorithmic).
Warface is pay to win garbage.
Mediocre games? Sure, Warface isn't great, Ryse had bad gameplay I hear, but the Crysis series is solid.
Crytek has been indifferent towards indies to an almost apathetic degree though, and that is terrible. I also think that Cryengine 3 needs better documentation and better examples to be able to compete with UE4.
A lot of people, including myself, would disagree. I thought the gameplay in the first half of the first Crysis was mediocre but entertaining enough, then when the aliens turned up, the entire game was borderline unplayable.
The second game eschewed everything that made the first successful, and despite some positive refinements to the way the suit worked, it was just another generic as hell corridor shooter.
Didn't bother with the third part, and probably never will.
ps they could have done a Battlefield kind of thing back in Crysis while the engine was(and probably still is) quite capable, somehow they decided to go with the trend of Cod which now we can say didn't quite work out for both of the parties.
Your last point underlines what the one guy said, that they wrere hunting the trends and were always behind. Major problem for their MP was that it was so easily for cheater and hacker to attack, that it was basically dead at birth
http://kotaku.com/sources-crytek-uks-staff-are-currently-on-leave-1599923133