Crytek

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Crytek GmbH

logo
legal form GmbH
founding 1999
Seat Frankfurt am Main , Germany
management Avni Yerli, Faruk Yerli
Number of employees 550
Branch Entertainment software
Website www.crytek.com
As of December 20, 2016

The Crytek GmbH is a German game developers , who in 1999 by the Turkish-born brothers Cevat Yerli , Avni Yerli and Faruk Yerli in Coburg was founded. In April 2006 the head office was relocated to Frankfurt am Main . The company employs around 550 people. Crytek is one of the largest German companies in the computer game industry.

The studio is particularly known for its CryEngine , which is licensed by developers all over the world and is considered to be state of the art. The company's most successful games are its debut Far Cry and the Crysis series.

history

Crytek was founded in 1997 by the three brothers Faruk, Avni and Cevat Yerli in Coburg , but it was not officially registered as a company until 1999. The three brothers, who were still studying at the beginning, showed a first technology demo at the Nvidia booth at the ECTS video game fair in 2000, and at that time attracted attention in the game industry for the first time. For several years the studio then released various demos of a game with the working title X-Isle . In May 2002, the development of its own game engine, the CryEngine , was announced.

The company's first game was the first-person shooter Far Cry , which emerged from X-Isle . The title came on the market in March 2004 and became a worldwide success. Over 2.6 million copies of the game were sold at full price worldwide. At Metacritic , the average rating for Far Cry is given as 89%. At the time of publication , the game engine CryEngine, which was specially developed for Far Cry, was considered to be one of the world's leading technical game development engines and received special praise for its realistic representation of external worlds.

Then Crytek began developing the first-person shooter Crysis and a successor for the CryEngine. In April 2006 Crytek moved from Coburg to Frankfurt am Main, and in the same year a subsidiary studio was opened in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. On May 19, 2007 the opening of a further studio in Budapest was announced. In an interview with Welt Online on August 21, 2007, co-founder Cevat Yerli stated that he wanted to leave Germany in the event of a production ban on “ killer games ”. Crysis was finally released by the publisher Electronic Arts in November 2007. The development was based on the CryEngine 2, the development of which cost 15 million euros. This makes Crysis the most expensive computer game ever produced in Germany. In several interviews, Cevat Yerli had given the number 95% as the assessment target. The goal was not quite achieved despite a far above-average rating of 91%.

On July 14, 2008, Crytek took over the Bulgarian developer Black Sea Studios , which operated under the Crytek Black Sea label until the end of 2016. Crytek is also interested in the Asian market and operated a studio in Seoul from October 2008 to the end of 2016 . At the beginning of February 2009, the company took over the previously insolvent British developer Free Radical Design , who was known for the first-person shooter Haze and the Time Splitters series , among other things . In 2008 the title Crysis Warhead was also published .

At the beginning of 2011, Crysis 2 and the CryEngine 3 were released.

The number of employees has now risen to over 600, around 50% of them in Germany. Various media outside of the games industry also reported on the success story of the founders, for example Crytek appeared in the 12/2006 issue of Neon magazine in the list of the “100 most important young Germans” in the business category.

According to an interview by Cevat Yerli with NowGamer , Crytek UK (subsidiary from Nottingham ) should take over the development of Homefront 2 , the successor to Homefront . The publisher was not supposed to be Electronic Arts; instead, Crytek wanted to do this itself.

On April 26, 2012, Crysis 2 won the German Computer Game Award as the best German game. Reason of the expert jury "With Crysis 2 , developers from Germany have impressed and impressed audiences and experts worldwide for the first time in terms of technology, quality and economy."

On October 21, 2013, Crytek released the free-to-play shooter Warface . The game received mostly mediocre to negative ratings from the trade press. Above all, it was criticized that the shooter is mainly based on other games and hardly has its own techniques.

On February 21, 2013, Crysis 3 was released for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and was the conclusion of the Crysis trilogy. The single player part was developed by Crytek Frankfurt and the multiplayer part by Crytek UK. Crysis 3 received mostly positive ratings. The opulent graphics and the cinematic soundtrack were positively highlighted, but the short and predictable plot of the campaign was criticized.

At E3 2013, Crytek presented the action adventure Ryse: Son of Rome as part of the Microsoft presentation for Xbox One . The title acts as the launch and exclusive title for Microsoft's new console. The game is about a young Roman soldier at the time of Emperor Nero , who loses his entire family through a political intrigue. Ryse: Son of Rome received average ratings from the trade press. The bombastic graphics and the well-told story are praised, but the gameplay is criticized, which becomes boring in the long run and is only suitable for genre fans.

In June 2014, the game magazine GameStar reported the company's financial problems. Among other things, salaries are said to have been paid out late and the first employees applied to other companies due to the threat of bankruptcy. Responsible for this are the weak license business with the CryEngine, production problems around the game Ryse and the insufficient income from the free-to-play business and from titles such as Crysis . The report referred to the period around April 2014. The publication was withheld until after the E3 game fair out of consideration for the employees. During this time, the situation for Crytek improved as the company was able to secure further financing, according to Avni Yerli.

At the end of July 2014 it was announced that Crytek had sold the trademark rights to the first-person shooter Homefront, including the development studio in Nottingham, to Koch Media . The offshoot Homefront: The Revolution , which was currently under development at Crytek Nottingham , was also completely sold and from then on further developed under the direction of Koch Media. The studio was renamed Deep Silver Dambuster Studios. At the same time, Crytek announced that it would downsize the Austin development studio. The development of the game Hunt will be relocated to the company's headquarters in Frankfurt and the Austin branch will be converted into a sales office for the CryEngine.

At the end of December 2016, Crytek closed its studios in Budapest, Sofia , Istanbul , Seoul and Shanghai in order to concentrate on its core competencies in Frankfurt am Main and Kiev .

At the end of February 2018, Cevat Yerli resigned as managing director and has been working for Crytek as a consultant ever since.

In February 2019, the Kiev office went into business for itself and separated from Crytek to continue working on the game Warface alone. At the same time, the studio was renamed Blackwood Games.

Former locations

  • Studio Austin (Crytek USA Corp .; founded in 2013 after taking over the core team from Vigil Games , converted into sales office for CryEngine in 2014)
  • Studio Budapest (Crytek Hungary Kft .; founded in 2007, closed in 2016)
  • Studio Istanbul (Crytek Oyun Yazilim ve Pazarlama Limited Sirketi; founded in 2012)
  • Studio Kiev (Crytek Ukraine Ltd .; founded in 2006, split off and renamed Blackwood Games 2019)
  • Studio Nottingham (Crytek UK Ltd .; founded in 1999 as Free Radical Design Ltd. , taken over by Crytek in 2009, sold to Deep Silver / Koch Media in 2014 )
  • Studio Seoul (Crytek Ltd .; founded in 2009, closed in 2016)
  • Studio Shanghai (Crytek Software Co., Ltd .; founded in 2011, closed in 2016)
  • Studio Sofia (Crytek Black Sea EOOD; founded in 2001 as Black Sea Studios , taken over by Crytek in 2008, closed in 2016, taken over by Sega in early 2017 and renamed Creative Assembly Sofia)

Subsidiaries

  • Crytek license management (Crytek license management GmbH in Frankfurt am Main)
  • GFACE (Crytek Gface GmbH in Frankfurt am Main; founded 2011)

Former subsidiaries

  • Mass Virtual (founded in 2009 as RealTime Immersive, Inc. in Orlando / Florida; responsible for licensing the CryEngine to government agencies such as the US Army and international armaments companies such as the French Thales Group, as well as for supporting them in the development of military training simulations ; now owned by the United States)

criticism

In September 2011 allegations of allegedly poor working conditions became known. Among other things, people are said to have been unjustifiably dismissed and employees have suffered “medically and personally”. Co-founder Avni Yerli denied all allegations in an interview with Develop Online. At the same time, however, he admitted that he was in legal disputes with some former employees. In addition, employees are said to have been asked directly to leave the company.

The US developer studio and direct competitor Epic Games , developer of the game engine Unreal Engine , expressed increasing criticism regarding Crytek's skills in handling game consoles. As a result, Crytek's in-house CryEngine lacks efficiency, in particular, to fully utilize existing hardware performance, so that no adequate optics can be achieved on medium-strength to weak systems. Cevat Yerli dismissed these allegations as "exaggerated and superficial". He emphasized that the latest engine optimizations were primarily aimed at delivering more graphics performance with fixed hardware.

Games

Below is a list of all the games released by Crytek:

  • 2004: Far Cry (Windows); all console conversions and successors are internal Ubisoft developments
  • 2007: Crysis (Windows), 2011 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
  • 2008: Crysis Warhead (Windows); Spin-off to Crysis ; developed by the subsidiary in Budapest
  • 2011: Crysis 2 (Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360); Multiplayer modes developed by the Nottingham subsidiary
  • 2012: Fibble: Flick 'n' Roll (iOS, Android); developed by the subsidiary in Budapest
  • 2013: Crysis 3 (Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360); Multiplayer modes developed by the Nottingham subsidiary
  • 2013: Warface (Windows), 2014 for Xbox 360; developed by the subsidiary in Kiev with the support of the subsidiary studios in Istanbul, Shanghai, Seoul and Sofia
  • 2013: Ryse: Son of Rome (Xbox One), 2014 for Windows; developed with the support of the subsidiary studios in Austin, Budapest and Sofia
  • 2014: The Collectables (iOS, Android); developed by the subsidiary in Budapest
  • 2016: The Climb (Windows with Oculus Rift)
  • 2016: Robinson: The Journey ( PlayStation 4 with PlayStation VR )
  • 2019: Hunt: Showdown

Crysis Wars is not an independent game, but part of Crysis: Warhead and is therefore not included in the list of games.

Unpublished games

  • Engalus (prototype for a science fiction ego shooter from the early years of Crytek)
  • Homefront: The Revolution (Nottingham development studio and trademark sold to Koch Media)
  • Redemption (survival game for consoles; should have been sold through EA)
  • Ryse 2 (working title) (discontinued after disagreements with publishing partner Microsoft )
  • Silent Space (prototype for a space game from the early years of Crytek; also under the working title Space Force )
  • X-Isle (prototype for a first person shooter with dinosaurs from the early years of Crytek; then redesigned to be Far Cry )
  • Warface (2019 split from Crytek Kiev, development to Blackwood Games and distribution to My.com)

Web links

Commons : Crytek  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Petra Fröhlich : Crytek closes five studios and gives up publishing. In: GamesWirtschaft. FUNFAIR MEDIA, December 20, 2016, accessed December 21, 2016 .
  2. ^ Far Cry. In: Metacritic.com. CBS Interactive Inc., accessed January 28, 2010 .
  3. ↑ Lars Winckler: Killer Game Debate; Game geniuses threaten to emigrate! In: Welt Online. Axel Springer AG, August 21, 2007, accessed on January 28, 2010 .
  4. ↑ Kristoffer Keipp: GCDC: Crysis cost 15 million euros - but was still profitable. In: PC Games Hardware Online. Computec Media AG, August 20, 2008, accessed on January 28, 2010 .
  5. ↑ Alexander Bohn: Exclusive: Crysis First Impression. In: Eurogamer.de. Eurogamer Network Ltd., August 20, 2007, accessed January 28, 2010 .
  6. ↑ Crysis. In: Metacritic.com. CBS Interactive Inc., accessed January 28, 2010 .
  7. ^ GamesIndustry.biz: Crytek acquires Black Sea Studios. Retrieved August 24, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Peter-Michael Ziegler: Video game industry: Ubisoft and Crytek buy, EA is dismantling. In: heise online. Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, February 4, 2009, accessed on January 28, 2010 .
  9. ↑ Deutscher-Computerspielpreis.de: Congratulations! These are the winners of the German Computer Game Award and Lara - The German Games Award 2012. Accessed on August 24, 2019 .
  10. ^ Warface - Free2Play
  11. ↑ Crysis 3 - PC
  12. ↑ Crytek was apparently on the verge of bankruptcy in April 2014, called on June 22, 2014
  13. ↑ Golem.de: Crytek sells Homefront and its studio to Koch Media , accessed on July 30, 2014
  14. ↑ Manuel Fritsch: Crytek Crisis - Official Statement: Most of the studios will be closed. In: GameStar . Webedia, December 20, 2016, accessed December 21, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Martin Dietrich: Crytek - Cevat Yerli resigns as managing director. In: GameStar . Webedia , February 28, 2018, accessed March 1, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Peter Steinlechner: Crytek separates from Warface. In: Golem.de . February 11, 2019, accessed February 11, 2019 .
  17. ↑ a b c d Stefan Recht: Crytek is closing! Everything out, except CryEngine, Frankfurt and Kiev! In: gameZINE.de . December 20, 2016 ( gamezine.de [accessed December 20, 2016]).
  18. ^ Jake Tucker: Creative Assembly acquires Crytek Black Sea. In: Develop . NewBay Media, March 7, 2017, accessed March 8, 2017 .
  19. ↑ Welcome to hire and fire crytek ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Crytek Denies Labor Conditions Allegations , September 5, 2011, accessed September 9, 2011
  21. ↑ MCVUK.com: In Crytek's defense. Retrieved August 24, 2019 .
  22. ↑ Tim Sweeney Interview (English) accessed September 11, 2011
  23. ↑ Crytek boss replies to engine criticism from Epic Games accessed on September 11, 2011
  24. ↑ No sequel: disputes between Crytek and Microsoft led to the project on PC Games , June 27, 2014, accessed on August 3, 2014