Tyrannical Tyrannosaurus Crytek steps down

#evil

Controversial Crytek boss Cevat Yerli steps down

Cevat Yerli, the controversial boss and co-founder of Crysis developer Crytek, has stepped down as CEO and president.

Yerli, who was public enemy number one as Crytek staff went unpaid for months, will continue as "strategic shareholder", but the company will now be led by his brothers Avni and Faruk as joint CEOs.

The change comes following the launch of multiplayer first-person shooter and monster hunting game Hunt Showdown, which is developed alongside CryEngine at the company's Frankfurt, Germany office. Crytek continues to work on Warface at its Kiev studio. Crytek's Istanbul office operates Warface in Turkey.

Crytek was on the brink of collapse back in 2014 after it let go of multiple studios and struggled to pay staff on time. In 2015, Crytek found emergency funding from Amazon, which spent millions on CryEngine tech used to create the Lumberyard engine. Then, in January 2017, Crytek found more money by selling Warface publishing rights to Russian-owned game giant My.com. A few months later Sega picked up Crytek Black Sea, which was working on a MOBA called Arena of Fate, and renamed it Creative Assembly Sofia.

I'd heard Crytek continued to struggle to pay staff as of August 2017. In its note to press on Yerli's departure, Crytek said an investment in autumn 2017 "has fortified Crytek and added the necessary capital for future growth".

Yerli had avoided the limelight following a damaging 2014 interview with Eurogamer in which he called unpaid staff "very impatient" and said they "got angry at the smallest delay".

"I was surprised and upset a little bit that the intention of us keeping together everybody upset a few of them," he said.

"But I understand that situation. Some people live in very tight financial planning. That's their own privacy. They can do whatever they want. Those guys, when they get under pressure it can become emotional. We tried to individually help out. Like if somebody gets in trouble they can talk to us directly so they don't get under pressure. We tried whatever we could do. But you can't make it right for everybody."

Yerli's comments were roundly criticised by the video game development community for being out of touch and insensitive to those who were struggling to make ends meet while working for the company.

Yerli did provide a comment for the press release issued today, however. It is reproduced in its entirety below:

"With the company in a strong position, now is the ideal time to recognize the existing leadership's excellent achievements over these past two years and formally transition executive leadership to Avni and Faruk. I have been honored to serve as CEO of the company I founded with my brothers almost 20 years ago and have seen the team accomplish breakthrough things in that time. I look forward to continue helping Crytek as a major shareholder, and I am very excited to see what tomorrow brings. I have every confidence that the company will continue to shine under the guidance of Avni, Faruk, and the rest of the leadership team."

Crytek faces an interesting future. It's working on Hunt Showdown as a Steam Early Access game, and is embroiled in a lawsuit with the makers of Star Citizen - Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries - over misuse of CryEngine.

PC gaming strikes again. Who would of known how shitty and destructive it would be to the gaming industry.

There is no excuse for not paying the staff on time. The fact that Yerli didn’t understand that still boggles my mind to this day. Crytek had all the promise in the world, but it seems as if the management is what held them back. It’s pretty crazy that this move didn’t happen until 2018. A move needed to be made right around the Crysis 3 launch. It was clear at that point that management was over their heads.

The guy who claimed all PC gamers were dirty pirates.

Eventhough the money they made from Crysis and Warhead (pc exclusives) meant they could open two new studios and buy two other studios.

The guy who claimed all the money was on consoles and COD clones.

Eventhough that decision made his company go bankrupt.

Dude was full of shit.

He and his company suck balls. Hope they don't win the lawsuit.

The mid-late 2000s were a pretty crappy time for PC gaming, it was so easy for companies to blame any shortcoming they had on PC piracy despite other games still finding success on PC. Your game could be an online multiplayer title and you could still get away with blaming piracy for why it did bad on PC. With the Xbox 360 selling games such as Halo and Call Of Duty very well all the PC devs assumed they could get numbers like that if they jumped ship to consoles and most of them have failed horribly in the process and ruined a lot of games/franchises. Cevat Yerli was honestly expecting Crysis to sell on the level of Halo 3 which is pretty unrealistic. Crysis is a good game but it does not have the story and lore of Halo which pulls in a lot of people, the game gets pretty weak near the end and Crysis was very difficult to run on many PCs, sure you could turn down the graphics but graphics was half the game's selling point but even then it still sold pretty well.

It was pretty dumb of Crytek to open up so many studios when they've hardly had them do anything worth justifying opening them.

Perhaps all this failure in pursuit of consoles has finally humbled them and have them return to their PC roots. Most of their endeavors on consoles have been flops. Their only steady source of income is their PC exclusive Warface, that game got a Xbox 360 version at one point but it was later shutdown since hardly anyone was playing it on there. The biggest budget game that was using their engine is a PC exclusive (Star Citizen), even Amazon who've bought their tech are using it to make PC exclusives as flagship titles for their engine. PC gaming is back and bigger than ever. Even Cliffy B who was trash talking PC gaming and PC gamers most of last gen have came crawling back after Gears Of War sales were starting to stagnate while budgets were getting bigger. Even though Lawbreakers flopped he can't blame piracy or lack of a core gamer audience on PC when games like PUBG and Overwatch have sold millions even more so since the game was on PS4 too.

Anyway Hunt Showdown is Cryteks last chance to rebuild the bridge they burned with PC gamers. Consoles won't save them and they don't even have the resources to make console versions at the same time as PC, the game needs to be a success on PC first before they can even think about making console versions later down the road. They know there is a market for games like Hunt on PC and its an online title so they can't blame piracy if this game flops or a lack of core gamers when their competitors are easily selling millions. Although looking on Steamspy the game has already sold over 120k copies but its only in English with server restriction to the USA and a few European regions. Once they localize game for most of the world I'm sure the numbers will go up even more.

The money they made from Farcry enabled them to make Crysis and Warhead, the money from that enabled them to further develop Cryengine, make Crysis 2, pay for its console marketing $$$$ and make a dumbed down version of Crysis 1 from scratch for console gamers. By the look of things Crysis 2 sold just enough to scrape by and make Crysis 3 and Microsoft paid for them to make Ryse. Now the only money they generate is from their engine license and from Warface on PC. I cant help but speculate as to weather Crytek would be in the state they are in now if they had stuck to making games primarily for PC?

Proof their games suck. Of course I predicted The Hunt was going to suck too, no surprise news other than the fact they haven't gone completely belly up yet...which they will. Likely someone will buy them and change the name perhaps, mostly for their talented guys and engine maybe which is in dire need of updating to stay in toe with performance in comparison to other modern engines.

Their problem is they never understood how to make games fun. Farcry was mostly successful due to it's surprise graphical prowess and what was then a unique setting with a first in a proper jungle but certainly not for it's story or gameplay. Crysis lived completely on hype based on graphics and that's what little they ever had to go on ever since.

Quite funny when you consider that he was the GAMER guy in all the brothers that founded the company. I believe there was an article about how his passion for games led to the demo that eventually become Far Cry. So sad that Crytek lost all the goodwill and respect when their GAMER boss turned into a suit chasing console money.

Crytek only good game was Crysis and warhead. Crysis 1 was something they really nail it. Far cry 1 was pretty bad, it was tech demo where enemy spot who behind the walls plus second half was so bad that even good first half cannot save.

Crysis 1 was groundbreaking game, with unique gameplay and a graphical powerhouse until Metro 2033 in 2010 surpassed it.

the sequels suck so much and flop at same times are the reason why crytek has to close all studio.

lets hope this news would be blessing in disguise and they back to PC roots and make something like Crysis 1. this is not 2009 anymore where developers have to dumbed down game to make multiplatform. i mean look at 4A games. continously improving over thier predecessor again and again.

What are you talking about, CryEngine has excellent performance for all the features it provides. There are no engines on the market with the graphic and physics tech of Cryengine. The problem with CryEngine is it's not user friendly and lacks good tools compare to rest of the engines. The technology it self is excellent.

Speak for yourself, I found Far Cry to extremely fun and so is true for Crysis. Graphics were just icing on the cake. Now Crysis 2 and onwards is a complete different story.

They have certainly made some poor decisions. Hunt: Showdown is quite good for .128 version, so I'm excited to see how they improve upon it.

Crysis and Warhead were their last good games; although, there is some hope with Hunt.

Pretty much only reason it got bought was because it was a benchmark for your PC at the time.

There games have always been horrible.

I do have a love/hate for Crytek. On one hand, Crytek did introduce me to the PC gaming world when Crysis was release back in 2007 and I been PC gaming since, I wouldn't be one if Crytek didn't make Crysis. Crytek got into greedy mode when they saw shooters like Call of Duty, Halo, Killzone sell like crazy, Crytek didn't even notice most console gamers who never played the first Crysis wasn't gonna bother with Crysis 2 and that game was build for consoles then PC.

I still have feelings for the company and I wish them a success with Hunt Showdown, but I would've prefer Crysis 4 even though I already know there will never be another first Crysis/Warhead gameplay.

And as for Cliffy B Lawbreakers, his stupid mistake was talking shit on Xbox One and made the mistake by releasing it just for PC/PS4 and lost a lot of money. Overwatch players weren't even gonna try Lawbreakers for the most parts anyway, I sure wasn't when I already own Overwatch.

Ironic that Crytek was doing fine until they went multi-platform, no?

They haven't made a good game since the original Crysis (a PC exclusive, at the time) which is arguably one of the great action games of all time, their games suffered huge drops in quality after that when they tried to please everybody on every platform, and they starting going broke when developing the then-Xbox-exclusive Ryse.

Funny how those of us lamenting and predicting their fall were called "bitter PC gamers" and the like, and it ends up being true. Simple fact is Crytek got greedy, lacked the skill to execute their vision, and catered to the wrong crowd. Either that, or they were two-hit wonders (Far Cry and Crysis) and this was going to happen anyway.

After that, it was all about grabbing money and making too many games at too many studios.

Hunt: Showdown is going to be terrible, riddled with bugs and not fun. I wouldn't be saying this if Crytek humbled themselves and went back to their roots, but maybe I will be wrong; as of now it's a PC exclusive so maybe they realized the err of their ways?

Crysis is the one exception, I would argue, to the "their games have always been horrible"; I did not have a good PC and played that game at 1024x768, and still enjoyed it. It was a gameplay marvel with nice graphics, not the other way around.

I think anyone that thinks otherwise just lacked the creativity to play the game it should have been played. Probably just turned on armor mode and "run n gunned" the whole time. Shame. The same people probably bought Dishonored and hated it for being a crappy "shooter".

I don't believe it's right to blame a game for a player's shortcomings.

I would argue that a good game engine would be easy to use, at least for game developers.

I think Kingdom Come: Deliverence is beautiful and actually runs pretty well, but I blame the bugs in that game as much on Crytek as I do Warhorse. I Don't imagine Crytek offered a whole lot of post-purchase support to the studio.

Totally agree with most of your statement, though; CryEngine has always been a beast, but not as much as people think.

Hope the employees of Crytek get paid since it was long overdue.

Crysis ended up losing its identity with Crysis 2 which was basically a sci fi Call Of Duty with levels that are a bit more wide so Crysis 2 lost a lot of the charm Crysis 1 had so the console gamers that did buy Crysis 2 didn't really get the hype behind the first Crysis and just thought the games were just glorified tech demos. Crysis 3 greatly improved but it was too late by then. If console gamers wanted a sci fi shooter they'd just play Killzone and Halo, if they wanted a game that plays like Call Of Duty they'd simply just play Call Of Duty which is why so many games that tried to be Halo and Call Of Duty flopped. I'm interested in Hunt: Showdown and will buy it later down the line when it has more polish and content and I hope its a success that will allow Crytek to make another Crysis game.

Lawbreakers possibly could have sold the most on Xbox One since Cliffy B is more well known among the Xbox crowd in terms of consoles and he pissed off PC gamers too much last gen. It seems he hasn't really learned his lesson, he thought that just because the Xbox has a smaller playerbase than PS4 and PC it wouldn't have sold very well there. But with the Nintendo Switch we're learning that having the biggest userbase may not be the best as too many people will try to target the largest userbase possible which means more competition we're already seeing with how some indie games on the Switch outselling the other consoles and even PC because of them being saturated with many games to chose from that they go under the radar.

If they kept making games exclusively/primarily for PC and didn't spread themselves thin with the multiple studios and over saturated budgets then they possibly could have been one of the biggest developers on PC along the lines of Blizzard, Firaxis, Creative Assembly, Valve, CD Projekt Red, Bethesda, Bohemia Interactive, Relic Entertainment and etc. Or one of the smaller but still very successful PC developers such as Tripwire Interactive and TaleWorlds Entertainment . They could've been the PC equivalent of Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games. There is a market for high end PC games but not the type of games that force you to upgrade every time a new one comes out. Those days are long over, a game needs to be scalable for lower end hardware and not look like ass. It took years for GPUs to come out that could run Crysis at 720p 30fps max settings properly, 60fps was out of the question unless you had a high end crossfire/SLI set up. Even on today's modern hardware Crysis still has big frame dips. If Crytek continued to work on their optimization for Cryengine so games would run better and released titles that were at least on par with Crysis 1 & Warhead in quality, they could have been very successful right now. They probably could've had a very dedicated and loyal fanbase especially since during 2007-2012 it seemed everyone was going to abandon PC and dumb down games for consoles so a bunch of PC gamers were supporting games they didn't even like to just to try and prove to devs that there is a market for PC gaming.

The exact same thing that crytek should follow. 4A is doing.

first they were indie developer who made linear shooter, it was success for PC fanbase, made sequel that improve over. and success again. become AAA developer. remaster both games. again success.

and now making something equivalant of STALKER and Crysis of this gen. open level, pushing hardware to limit, PC focus instead of apealing towards halo/COD.

Crysis today looks terrible. i mean im talking about vanilla crysis. the draw distance suck. rock apear when you zoom in. its dated nowadays.

Wow!

Crytek... how the mighty have fallen.

Yeah bad decisions all around.

Many developers went chasing that Halo/COD money. But see the thing is: Crytek didn't have to. They had a great idea with Far Cry and perfected it with Crysis and Warhead. Why they went so downhill after is just all on the heads of the studio, not the talented developers.

The Hunt has a lot of potential to be good, but I just don't like the idea of getting d!cked over by other people and losing my progression. And like Worthabuy explained really well in his preview: it's just a campfest.

Vanilla Crysis. Good thing it's easy to edit the .ini file, eh?

It is a bit of a campfest. A friend and I got to the boss just to get shot from two pussy campers sitting in a window right above the boss spawn. However, the game is fun as hell. And, we did manage to take down some camping teams, and it's extremely satisfying.

I also did take down one of the campers sitting in the window, but that 2nd f***er got me.

It just doesn't sound that fun to pub the game (playing with someone you don't know) or to get screwed over hard by other people and losing progress.

I'm sure the game can improve. The setting and graphics look absolutely ace. I also heard the sound design was really good.

You don't really lose progress. You'll lose that character, but there is an overarching XP bar that levels up where you unlock items and guns where you can buy them with the money you earn. You will earn money and that general XP for the match, even if you die.

So what if you buy an expensive weapon and 5-10 minutes into the match you die in some silly way ?

Most of the weapons are pretty cheap. 75 bucks for some of the better ones, and you can get that easily in one match by going in with a crappy 4 dollar gun. Also, even the cheap guns are deadly. On the flip side, you can extract early and still earn more money and XP for your character without having to go to the boss where everyone camps.

Find 2 or 3 clues, then extract and you'll earn a bunch of money/XP without risking all that much.

The Decima engine destroys it. Oh you are talking about third party engines.

Good. Maybe they'll sell the TimeSplitters IP to someone who gives a s***.

What does "would of" mean?

Yeah what Crytek had with Crysis was great but since it wasn't generating Halo/COD numbers it wasn't good enough in Cevat Yerli's eyes. I've been watching gameplay of Hunt and it looks really fun. On Steam nearly all the negative reviews/cons people have for the game is technical issues relating to optimization, servers, and some glitches most of which will get buffed out later on and they acknowledge the game is still good and will change it to positive once they're fixed. I'll probably buy Hunt when its near the summer and it has a discount.

4A is another good example. Even after Metro 2033 was a success on PC they didn't try to sell out to consoles and kept PC as the lead platform/main focus.

Crysis still looks pretty good, I find it a bit sad how it is still able to hold its own against games of today despite being a decade old. You can fix the draw distance with some file edits. There are hardly any other games with the amount of destruction/physics and environment interactions that Crysis has as well.

Would have can never be written "would of." However, the latter does exist: when the present conditional would is followed by an expression that begins with of.

She would, of course, live with me.

Past: She would, of course, have lived with me.

I ask no more of you than I would of myself.

Past: I asked no more of you than I would’ve of myself.

Well said this company had so much promise after the original Crysis then they sold out and dumbed down their sequels and lost money lol. It's funny there is a local pizza shop I go to where one of the cooks looks so much like Cevat Yerli maybe now he can join him lol.

Depends on the developer. I think Crytek first designed the engine for their requirements and then retrofit it for the big studios. I'm not well versed in engines or big productions but the little I heard from the industry that CryENgine actually has all the tools for established AAA studios and fits within their workflow pretty well. What it lacks is it's not very indie friendly. I tried all engines UE4, Unity and CE3 when I wanted to learn game development and I have always found CryEngine to the difficult of all 3 but the things I can do in CryEngine I cannot in either UE4 or Unity. Power definitely comes with complexity and being a software engineer for 8 years I can definitely say that the most powerful tools are also the most complex to learn and develop on.

Don't talk about things you have no idea about. Based on HZD and KZ:SF no. Decima dont have SVOTI, hybrid deferred + forward rendering, no realtime physics enabled vegetation or TOD system where every light source and shadows that are dynamic, nor does it have the realtime dynamic weather (no just because the weather in your game =/= the dynamic weather of CryENgine where the water in the lake can freeze and then melts and evaporates on the fly in realtime without prebaking anything)

To be fair, Cryengine was made for first person shooters. Turning it into an RPG is a pretty ambitious feat for any developer. It still has first person at its core, but now it has interactable objects besides just cars, an inventory system, a leveling system, dialogue, barter and persuasion system, etc.

It does have some bugs, even game breaking ones, but I've put 50 hours into the game so far and love it.

Somewhat agree but don't completely. It was developed for FPS but the engine at its core is general purpose. You can pretty much develop all genres in it. What they have out of the box is a FPS template and doesn't feature multiple out of the box templates for different genres for indie and small developers like UE4 does. Like I said it's not indie friendly, any establish developer can easily make any genre in it but now most big publishers use their in house engines. And this was a norm before UE4 came out in the last gen. UE3 has a single template that was mostly based around shooters since it was designed for AAA industry and sold for millions of dollars. Only now the engines have come down in price due to the explosion of indie scene.

True, I will concede. If a big time dev took it over, like Rocksteady, they might make something with a lot less bugs. Although, Ubisoft would still screw it up. Lol

Lol yeah. And it's a shame because Crytek in its current state lacks the talent and resources to make user friendly tools like UE4. Imagine this amount of power in the hands of all the indies and there are many talented and passionate indie devs, we would have gotten really awesome looking and playing games.

I honestly think Crytech is going to die out soon. No idea what's going on with them.

Nah, they already have nearly 5,200 reviews for Hunt: Showdown on Steam. This game is taking off in quite a big way. Most of the negative reviews are nagging on technical issues, but it's in early access, so I'm not sure why people even bother with that kinda stuff.

It's a great game, and it actually could save them from any demise.

Well there is Amazon's Lumberyard which is basically Cryengine with better online tech. Amazon has definitely way more resources than Crytek so we'll have to see what they do with the engine. And speaking of what Cryengine was made for, a lot of games that were made with Cryengine 3 and above are MMOs.

Reminds me of an interview from Frank Zappa talking about music executives:

The same could be argued for gaming. Just look at Nintendo. It's been run by non-gamer CEOs for almost its entire existence.

I hope he walks into a moving bus, also!! Maybe a lightning bolt strikes him while he's bending over to pick up his keys. Yeah, that'll learn him

Yeah, that could happen. I totally forgot about Lumberyard, Amazon definitely have the resources to make it work with indie devs, though that won't really be easy. All the actual gurus that made CryENgine, CryEngine are not at the same place. Epic picked one, another one's now with Id and many are with CIG, and probably even more.

True but you gotta keep in mind that Nintendo also paid dearly for it as well. They lost all the 3rd Party support, lost major share to Sony in home consoles and are now generally lagging behind Sony and MS in terms of online and other modern features. Now I'm not saying they didn't have success or they never put out excellent games, they have been kings of handheld but just putting out that it wasn't all a smooth sailing.

I think we got sidetracked, I didn't want to say that truly business people are always bad but many times we have seen that suits usually screw gamers more. Take an example of the current AAA publishers and even in case of Nintendo. What I was saying that I read an article quite a number of years back on Cevat and how it sounds like a passionate gamer that spends his days and nights trying to code for the game/demos and how he was willing to sacrifice all the money and his school for a chance to make a game he likes. Funny thing was he found success when he did that and burn down Crytek when he started chasing the console money, blaming piracy and compromising his product like a suit.

@pc_rocks: I wonder if Amazon recruited any programmers/engineers from Crytek. All I hear about is who've they've hired to make games in house but nothing on people who will work on the engine. I haven't heard much news on any games being made with Amazon Lumberyard other than Star Citizen/Squadron 42 and Everywhere from Leslie Benzies. Aside from small project/practice stuff I found this game that was at the PC Gamer Weekender, but from just the looks you wouldn't have known it was a Cryengine/Lumberyard game since visuals certainly aren't its strong point. I almost thought it was a UE3/UDK game.

Technical Issues in Cryengine? one of the worst over hyped steaming pile of... :P

Who would of guessed?

Quite the contrary. Frostbite, UE..etc all perform way better. CE has graphical prowess but it's actually quite dated. Cryengine 2 has only been updated through mostly in it's abilities to utilize consoles and VR. That's why other highly graphical games perform better. It's also not designed for RPG's...notice the difference of Witcher 3 in performance to Kingdome Come. Look at the performance of Everyone's Gone to the Rapture which is just a simple walking sim, to virtually any outdoor game that has equal or better graphics plus physics..etc. Either way you want to view it, it's impossible to create a game like GTA 5 on such an engine due to performance.