Crysis 3 launched this week 4 years ago. Crytek now in shambles. What went wrong and what they need to do to fix it?

Let em die. They're in control of their own destiny.

Ha! I was going to add that as an option something like close down all their studios including the main one in Frankfurt (the one that made Far Cry, Crysis) and start over. But I think that would have been too harsh.

Funny thing is if you look at other successful studios like ID Software, they didn't go on a shopping spree and started opening up half a dozen ID branches all over the world despite the success of Doom series and Quake series. Same thing with Bungie with their successful Halo series or Epic Games with Unreal and Gears of War series. What were they thinking? That having 2 - 3 hit games now means a green light to open up half a dozen studios and try to expand like crazy. You don't even see Valve and Blizzard doing that despite being hugely successful. They only have the same studios as when they originally started.

They lost a tremendous amount of focus trying to expand too fast. Not even able to pay your employees for 6 months? WTF?

The industry is full of snakes so it's always nice to see one get stood on.

I've seen big reputable developers/publishers (eg Microprose, Sierra) come and go. The tears dried up years ago. ;)

Want to play Crisis 3 as it looks more fun than 2 which was disappointing but I have no PS3 now.

@Xtasy26: What went wrong? They partnered with AMD and had the gaming evolved intro. LOL

That dev is unable to create good games. Nothing's lost.

@silversix_: This. They haven't made a good game in 10 years.

Crytek is dead & gone. Simple as that. Crysis 3 was the last straw for them. Crysis 3 has it's flaws but In the end, it was just a shooter on rails without any really distinguishing features other than the fact that it looks fantastic. I think it is a somewhat of a good game, just not remarkable & nothing to write home about. Played Crysis 3 through EA Origin.

Your really not missing much. Feels like it was made for console play. Nowhere close to the level of Crysis 1. It was average for Xbox standards (not for PS3) and poor for PC standards.

Close their many studios...& make a good game?..

What went wrong ? Crysis 3: pretty looking but shit game.

Not a single f$&% given. The only game I liked from them was Crysis Warhead. I found the first Crysis game itself to be boring.

crysis 1 was a great game and crysis 2 and 3 tried to be call of duty with fancy graphics.

their latest "game", ryse, sums up how far they've fallen.

At this point they're beyond fixing. I think they actually just got the shit end of the stick. They did an excellent job with Crysis 2 but were lambasted for it by the lamenting PC master race. Never did get to play Crysis 3 but would be nice to try as I liked the 2nd game. Ryse too was actually pretty good, despite all the hate for it I just think it got hated on for being an Xbox One launch exclusive. Though, MS offered to pay for a sequel on condition they retain the IP, Crytek refused because they wanted to retain an asset they could later auction off after going through bankruptcy as they'll likely do at some point if they haven't already. But they're done pretty much as developers, they've essentially minimized themselves to provide nothing more than CryEngine support, which itself is pretty dead end as they've always been trying to push their engine and failing to make it big, and that's definitely not going to happen without them making games to showcase it to developers.

Their worse decisions I'd say was their acquisition of Free Radical to work on Homefront: The Revolution. Here you have a studio that couldn't put out Battlefront 3, who made Haze, who squandered Disney's money to put out that air-ball of a Halo Killer and didn't have the money to finish the other game. Why would Crytek see them as an asset worth acquiring?

Well the Crysis series sucked. I'll tell you what happened in no particular order. They spent millions on the Cryengine 2.0 engine alone and with Crysis 1 reported that they only broke even. Crysis Wars (forgot about that didn't you?) failed and cost them a fair bit to create. Crysis Warhead probably didn't make it's own money back but who knows. They probably lost money on the port for the PS3 version of Crysis 1 considering it was a snooze release and no retailer seemed to offer it for sale that I know of, hardly anyone even knew it existed. Then they invested more millions into Cryening 3, 4 and 5. They also have not sold that many licenses for the engine especially compared to say Epic's Unreal engine series. Continuing with Crysis 2 and 3 which likely didn't make up for everything else lost.

Then they bought Homefront IP which horribly failed. I think they bought a couple other licenses too. Robinson Journey.....failed. And you can tell they spent a ton of money making that game too. They opened up several large studio's and basically what's going on is that they had to close them after Robinson's failure. Crtyek's main headquarters is still going. They reported that they are still going to continue working on games.

I think Crytek will be fine, they just had to shrink back to roots to resolve money issues.

Crysis fuggin sucked, get over it.

Honestly I love the Crysis games, I think they are amazing. Crysis is obviously the best one (Warhead might actually be better), and one of the best shooters to have come out ever. Crysis 2 is the worst in the series, but I like where they went with the story to be honest. Crysis 3 was pretty cool and wrapped it up nicely.

What went wrong, though?

Crytek. Crytek went wrong. Their eyes were bigger than their stomach, they got greedy, they thought they could play in the "AAA" big leagues and they were an "A" (is that a thing?) at best. They made too many subsidiaries and too many projects, tried to do too many new things and they abandoned their bread and butter (PC) for what they thought were greener pastures (console) because the grass is always greener (but really, it rarely is) on the other side. Then they realized their mistake and made some cheap shit free-to-play/pay-to-win nonsense to make some quick cash, but it was bullshit and no fun and that failed.

What happened? They made Ryse, the flagship Xbox One game when the console was released, and it was a terrible game.

And now they're bankrupt or close to it.

TL;DR: everything but Far Cry and Crysis went wrong

They were able to make great games at one time, now they can't. I'd call that a huge loss.

They were simple, great developers; both technically talented, and able to design great levels, gameplay, etc.. Then they thought they could be gods and ruined it all. It's a freaking tragedy is what it is.

@pimphand_gamer:

Actually Crysis 1 sold over one million copies mark by Feb of 2008 at full retail price. Crysis development cost was 22 million.

In August of 2008

""CEO and President of game developer Crytek said Crysis cost 15 million Euros (22 million USD) to develop during a panel about the future of gaming graphics at the Games Convention Developers Conference in Leipzig, Germany. Yet despite the cost, Yerli maintained the game was profitable, adding, "if it wasn't profitable I wouldn't be able to stand here.""

Crysis 2 and 3 is what made them broke even, Crysis 2 not sure on cost but Crysis 3 cost to develop was 66 million.

They held Timesplitters hostage and that asshole Cevat Yerli teased us with a HD remake of the trilogy if he could get enough petition signatures (and demanded a ridiculously high number, like 300K). Link

Fvck 'em.

And fvck Gamespot for that stupid fucking filter on fvck.

Although I may not care about Crytek's ultimate fate, I also don't have any vindictiveness because they tried to expand to other platforms. That's what any company would do. They just didn't go about it the right way.

Fun fact.

One of the original designers of the CryEngine made a free, open-source, Quake-clone called Cube before he joined Crytek. It has very low hardware requirements, fast movement speed, and a high frame rate. I played the crap out of that game in high school, and the community has kept it alive for over a decade now.

but PC gamers love CDPR who are in same line as Cryetek after abondon PC and go to console route.

I predict crytek will shut down this year

Either go back to PC or shut down all studios.

And to think these were the guys who gave us far cry 1 and crysis 1.*sigh* They're gone now. Nothing can be done about it now. They tried to copy COD when instead they should have followed what made them successful in the first place.

@ghosts4ever: with the Witcher 3 released and seeing as console version sold better than PC version I can see the future where cdpr too will shift to console market and just release PC ports in the future. But I can be wrong. For now I trust cdpr to not screw with their original market base, the PC to favour the console market.

Go back to make a good game. I know they're capable, making Crysis and Warhead probably wasn't just luck. Making Crysis 2 and 3 suck balls was planned by them. They thought dumbing down their games so they could work on consoles and release them there would make them much more money, but it just made the fans give them the finger and not buy the games. Crytek deserves all the shit they get and hopefully this is a lesson learnt.

Crysis and Warhead were great, then it all went to hell.

Crytek needs to stop pissing about and focus on Crysis games.

What did they spent it all? hookers and new cars? seriously Crysis 3 didn't bring anything new from 2nd game, it was again a console game with maybe better multiplayer?

things started to smell off when they released a sequel to crysis that had little to nothing to do with the first game(s). that was the first clue that whomever was steering the ship might be slightly drunk at the wheel. crysis 3 confirmed the captain had been drinking and they'd set course for the iceberg. several failed business ventures and flopping games later was them hitting the iceberg. now they're just gaming flotsam whose only real hope of getting back into the big time is some kind soul launching an expensive rescue operation to salvage the wreckage. tragic

Let them die. Never liked their games. Far Cry was meh, Crysis 1 was just a tech demo, as a game it sucks.

Rapid expansion wasn't AMD's fault.

Wow, it's crazy that game is already 4 years old.

Still an amazing looking piece of tech. Though nowhere as good as Crysis 1 and warhead, it was miles better than Crysis 2.

What can they do to fix Crytek ? I think they've tried everything now, exhausted every option. They can no longer be redeemed.

An unfortunate truth.

Great hypocrite in action. Very great.

the funny thing is. Crysis 2 (no matter how dumbed down it was) was better game than witcher 3.

As a business, they were run into the ground, and as developers they declined severely in quality. It's been 10 years since they released a top game, time to let them go.

Their games are generally boring so let their employees move on to other studios/opportunities and shut'em down.

Gameplay wise yes, no question.

Story was an incomprehensible mess that wanted to be Halflife 2.

But overall - still better than the Witcher 3.

exactly my thoughts. I dont get people saying Crysis 3 was a bad game. Have they even play it ? Sure Crysis 1 and Warhead are better games but the direction Ctysis 3 took was much better than 2 which was a massive disappointment ( sure Crysis 3 wasnt the open world level of Crysis but the levels are quite big and allow some flexibility on the way you play )

As for Crytek they sold 3 million copies of Crysis on pc eventually and still werent happy with sales and thought going console centric will allow them to compete against the COD and Battlefields of this world and started aquiring studios and all that without even releasing a quality product other than Crysis 3 but it was to late for them as their pc fanbase abandoned them and console gamers didnt care as much for Crysis franchise

@adamosmaki: exactly.

it's like I opened a restaurant and broke even, which is incredible because restaurants (and game devs) have a huge failure rate.

but no, that wasn't good enough. So not only did I abandon my successful restaurant, I thought I was successful enough to take on McDonalds, Burger King, and Carl's Jr. all at the same time, which is not only A.) an entirely different type of restaurant style I am not familiar with, but B.) an entirely different league of business requiring a lot more success and capital (both literal capital and the reputation kind) than I had.

Holy wall of text Batman!

All the talented people that were once at Crytech are now at C.I.G., they don't have much left at this point.

I would say Ryse is the straw that broke the camel's back.

When you look at that turd, there really is no going back.

The should take contracts, but deny every single one of them using some gimmic.

One in a while they would make another good game again.

@crashnburn281: Actually when you look at Ryse it is fantastic. It's when you play it the problems start.

Cevat Yerli got too big headed.

Crysis was a benchmark for PC, then it shifted off to consoles to get lackbusting sequels nobody cared about. As nobody played it for the story to start with.

The endless focus on consoles made pc gamers move away from it as it also didn't push tech anymore forwards.

The shitty anti consumer practises with it, nobody cared.

They choose there destiny, and honestly they should be made a example of how to do not do business.

What happened, they made a masterpiece in 2007, but it was too heavy for the PCs of it's time and impossible to recreate on console, so they dumbed things down for the console users and made two average games after.
Guess we can blame those weak consoles for destroying what could have been an amazing franchise.