More news on some job losses today following the Unity game engine layoffs, we have Crytek also shedding staff and shelving Crysis 4. On X / Twitter, the official Crytek account posted an image announcement. Crytek said it will affect about 15% of their staff, so about 60 people.
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Like so many of our peers, we aren't immune to the complex, unfavorable market dynamics that have hit our industry these past several years. It pains us greatly to share today that we must lay off an estimated 15% of our around 400 employees. The layoffs affect development teams and shared services. This has not been an easy decision to make, as we deeply appreciate the hard work of our talented teams. After putting the development of the next Crysis game on hold in Q3 2024, we have been trying to shift developers over to Hunt: Showdown 1896.
While Hunt: Showdown 1896 is still growing, Crytek cannot continue as before and remain financially sustainable. Even after ongoing efforts to reduce costs and cut operating expenses, we have determined that layoffs are inevitable to move forward. Crytek will offer affected employees severance packages and career assistance services.
We firmly believe in the future of Crytek. With Hunt: Showdown 1896, we have a very strong gaming service and remain fully committed to its operation. We will continue to expand and evolve Hunt: Showdown 1896 with great content and drive our strategy for our engine CRYENGINE.
Kimyrielle 5 hours ago
Anyone know what these "unfavorable market dynamics" even are? From what I have seen, industry revenue in the PC/console segments seem to be more or less stable and mobile is still growing a bit. In other words, people aren't spending less money on games. I suppose it's more unfavorable shareholders complaining about their yachts being too small?
It's not about revenue, but more about the cost of servicing debt. The dynamics of making games are massive upfront costs with the potential for future revenue years later; unless you happen to have hundreds of millions of your currency in your pocket, that means borrowing. In recent times, investment money was essentially free - that's not been the case for the last couple of years, and everyone's on the hook for the debt they got into to actually make their games.
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