Crytek Crisis: Crytek USA Loses Employees

Poor Crytek.  Seems nothing good can happen to these guys that’ll stick, can it?

So as I reported over the past few days, there was a bit of good news to come out of the Crytek Crisis—because of a recent cash injection, they were finally able to pay their employees.   That was good, and I foolishly speculated maybe that would be the end of the Crytek Crisis.  Oh, what a fool I was.  Because about a day later it was officially revealed that Crytek had to sell Homefront: The Revolution to do that.  But, optimistically, I said that they still had a few good IP’s under their belt, such as Hunt: Horrors of the Guided Age to see them through, don’t they?

I’m beginning to think I’m jinxing them, because as it turns out, the branch of Crytek who had been working on Hunt had already largely disbanded.

I’m talking about Crytek USA, which was located in Texas.  They suffered from the lack of pay just as bad as the other worldwide Crytek studios, but here’s the real kicker: of the 35 people team, most of them were former employees of Vigil, who was shut down after THQ went under.  They were literally ‘refugees’ from another failed company, and here they were working for what may be another one.  Point is, it was revealed via insider sources within the company that by the time Crytek got their “cash injection”, the majority of the team in Crytek USA had already quit—namely because they were promised their money back at June 20^th.  When that didn’t happen, they quit in droves—and have since, thankfully, gotten new jobs at new studios.

But that means Crytek USA, and the project they had been working on, is nearly dead!

For what it’s worth, Hunt isn’t actually dead yet.  The project has been sent to their main Germany-based studio to be finished there.     Still, that’s an entire branch of the company gone due to this crisis, at LEAST.  We’ve still not gotten a solid number of just how many people have gone since.

Normally I’d try to put some sort of optimistic spin at the end, but since that seems to be making problems worse I’m just going to be quiet and hope for the best.  In the meantime, let’s just be happy that the people at the former Vigil’s office (who made Darksiders) were able to land on their feet so quickly.