Crytek employees say they’re not being paid, again

If your not going to get paid for your work you might as well be an indie dev !

http://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees-not-paid

 

http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matth...s-are-unpaid-talent-leaving-on-a-daily-basis/

 

Unity too gud. They can't compete.

 

Personally, I've never developed in CryEngine, but I have to say games made with it are some of the most beautiful ones I've seen. However, Unity and Unreal look absolutely amazing and keep improving (as shown in the Adam demo), so I think whatever edge CryEngine had in graphic quality is now becoming less apparent. Unity has made giant leaps, especially in services offered (ads, analytics, uNet etc...) and it's just getting very tough for CryEngine. It's sad though, I still play Warface time-to-time

 

Someone posted from the comment section

 

Sadly enough stuff like this does happen in the industry, and really not much can be done if the money doesn't exist. Often the only and best option to push forward is to resign from the job, and often resign yourself to the idea of ever getting that money and effort back.

The company should have just laid off anyone it can't pay, instead of lying to itself and its employees. I wish everyone involved good luck on the job search crytek had some really good talent on both the engineering and Art side of things. Hopefully everyone can find new homes where they get paid what they are worth.

 

Yeah, to me the issue is more that people were allegedly strung along, as opposed to the fact that the money ran out. You can't necessarily stop things going bad, but you can give the people who are relying on your appropriate information to deal with it in the best way for them personally. If the situation was made clear early enough people might have walked voluntarily on their own terms, meaning less people to pay without leaving people stuck and/or without money, and also giving those who did move on a better position to do so from (eg: they could be more discerning about what they picked and less conservative when negotiating).

 

They should've kept making Crysis games. Being stuck with EA on Origin was a bad idea.

Crysis 3 being on Steam would've got it a lot more sales.

 

This.

A company going bust and having employees loose their job happens. Its part of life. Companies take risks, and occasionally they don't pan out.

A company not having enough cash on hand to meet its day to day debt obligations is called trading while insolvent. Its a criminal offence in many jurisdictions, with heavy fines.

If the rumours are true, and the company is insolvent, then the employees should be working with lawyers to get the company put into liquidation as quickly as possible. Employee wages are often considered unsecured debt, which means that employees often fall behind the banks and other creditors in priority for payment. And the longer a company continues to trade while insolvent, the less likely the employees are to see any money.

 

Why don't they just cut their losses and move on to greener pastures??? It's kinda obvious that cryengine is a sinking ship.

 

In the past when Crytek could not pay employees, it was an opportunity for Star Citizen to pick up a bunch of talent. Maybe the same thing will happen this time.

 

Families and life and stuff. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, late pay is still better then no pay.

 

Can I just point out that all Crytek leavers are quite welcome to apply to https://careers.unity.com/ providing they can of course. I don't work at Unity, so I'll say what Unity thinks

 

Form an orderly queue, terrain guys first...

 

Vegetation system guys second!

 

Seems now is the right time for Bethesda to strike, and buy Crytek. EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Activison, they all got their own engines.

Yes Bethesda got id Tech. But, I don't think it is even good nowadays. They could though combine the techies and work on a new engine. Hell, didn't even one CryTek graphics programmer join id Tech some time ago already? Because if I recall, this was the case.

Funny thing is that Dishonored was made with UE3. I don't know about Dishonored 2, but Prey is made with the CryEngine V, and NOT with UE4. So, why the hell is that so? o.0

You see, Dishonored was made by Arkan Studios. And Prey is also made by Arkane. But why would they switch from Unreal to CryEngine? I guess that they are getting sick of visual scripting and C++, too...

Oh, the Elder Scrolls: Legends, just like Hearthstone, seem to use Unity! However, if Bethesda bought CryTek, they would lock it down just like they did it with id Tech. :/

 

Prey (2006) was running on idTech 4.

I think if they did that, it could be the end of Bethesda. The company has been doing some very questionable moves lately, and instead of providing TES experience people love, they were trying to chase popular trends, quite unsuccessfully. Do the even have the money to acquire Crytek?

Besides... why bother with buying company when you can license their engine?

 

Since most of Crytek's troubles seem to come from a similar series of moves chasing popular trends, its probably not a good idea.

The only real reason to buy Crytek would be to acquire the rights to some of their earlier IP. I would imagine the right hands could make that very valuable. That said there is a lot of valuable IP out there for people with money to choose from.

 

Dishonored 2 uses a modified Id Tech 5. I assume they were forced to in some way, or because UE4 was still pretty much alpha at the time. Maybe Bethesda will try to use the same engine for all their games in the future.

 

True, but with the current alleged trend the next pay is probably going to be late too... and depending on your confidence in getting a new job that course of action may in fact get you paid more quickly. Also, technically, the two months already owing would still be owing (though in reality that might not mean anything).

 

Definitely true.

Plus it will be all complicated by the possibility of restructuring and redundancy payments. I've seen plenty of people hold onto jobs they didn't like on a sinking ship in the hope that things would go down and they would get paid out. If you've been with a company a while, redundancy payments build up.

Anyway, just pointing out that there are dozens of complex factors that go into the decision of an employee to stay or go in these situations.

 

I'm talking about Prey (2017). I know, confusing names.

Good to know. I suspected it was UE4, or rather the updated UE3 that can be seen in Batman: Arkham Knight. Wiki says that only 20% of id Tech 5 remained in the "Void" engine. Not bad. That was some ditching. And now the question is even bigger. Why the hell did Arkane put effort into id Tech 5 to make a Void, but then just uses CryEngine V for Prey (2017) instead?

Fun fact. UE4 is now the only derp engine that doesn't come with a scripting language. Even Stingray got in addition to C++, and its "Flow" visual scripting, Lua. Xenko look so like Unity, but with an actual editor compared to this stinking filth called Unity editor. And Xenko is even C# in its engine core, too.

Xenko looks very interesting. I think it's a bad idea to use C# for the engine core. But hell, there is F# code that runs faster than C++ in some ray trace benchmark (I can't find the link now)! When I tried Xenko yesterday, I was surprised that the engine got very rich templates. Better than UE4 and Unity. Xenko showed off C# 6.0 and its new features. You see, now Unity is stinking filth yet again. Unity website and launcher looks and functions better than its "editor". -.-

I just seem unsure which kind of stinking filth Unity editor is. Ape, horse, or bull? What do you think?

To be fair though, the Unity engine itself made tons of very good improvements. But boy, the editor has to die sooner than later. C# needs and update too.

 

New features like Nested Prefabs, but hey we'll get those any day now

 

Blueprints doesn't count? Most Unreal devs I encounter use blueprints almost exclusively and hardly touch C++. (All two of them, the engine isn't hugely popular here).

 

Skyrim Special Edition is apparently very successful in the UK. Clearly we need an Oblivion Special Edition too. I'd pay for it to not crash every two to three hours.

 

As far as I know (tested it), it is not a very good product, on the "quick cash grab" level, pretty much. If the game was originally released in thsi state, it would've been another story. They could've done proper remaster, you know? With PBR materials and all that.

Also, they seem to be desperately trying to turn their modders into some sort of revenue stream. So, they're moving mods onto their domain, etc.

I've recently replayed Fallout 4 too, and one of the most infuriating things there was that someone had the "bright" idea that installing mods should disable achievements. In a bethesda game, which will be normally full of bugs that will require 3rd party fixes. The whole season pass was wasted on trying to awkwardly milk some cash off the "minecrafting" mechanics that don't even work properly and aren't well thought out.

So, as far as I can tell, the future doesn't look good for Bethesda. They look like they're losing their touch. And that may lead to either an epic screwup or the studio turning into another EA.

 

Yes, but that's the fault of targeting an at the time very dated console generation. Skyrim would have had to be delayed at least another two years if not more to target the XBox One and PlayStation 4. That being said I'm very happy they didn't perform a complete remaster. Many modders are only porting their mods because of the very low effort required to do so.

Skyrim Special Edition does it too.

From what I've heard Far Harbor was very good. I'm too busy playing the original Skyrim (I can't live without SKSE and SkyUI which haven't been fully ported yet) to play Fallout 4. Frankly though I'd rather see them create one or two high quality packs than trying to build several. I blitzed through the Fallout 3 DLCs and they were very forgettable.

The future definitely doesn't look good for the existing user base. I'm not convinced it's bad for Bethesda though.

 

Well, Far Harbor is pretty much what Fallout 4 should've been. Decent writing and all, and it is pretty much the only reason to buy Fallout 4.

Aside from that, the rest of the content is mostly misses. That includes the base game itself.

Well, the issue here is that Bethesda usually delivers an interesting buggy mess, and their last attempts were mostly targeted at something that has nothing to do with what made their game interesting. And the "Interesting buggy mess" without the "interesting" part does not make a very good product.

Basically, they could either die or devolve into some sort of company that makes faceless products, like EA or Ubisoft.

 

Apparently some of them havent been paid for 6 months

 

No, visual scripting isn't the same as C#. BP visual scripting is good for very, very small stuff only. I gave it a fair try, and my experience is that visual scripting isn't any simpler than C# either. Even for small stuff. It's more slick in UE4, but only because BPs are more embedded into Actors than C# into game objects in Unity. Also the framework in UE4 is more polished and compact, compared to this Unity bloat fest.

Thinking that visual scripting really maters is a delusion. Visual scripting tells you: "See, you are an artist. So you are and idiot. But with visual scripting, even an idiot such as yourself, can program!". Though, it only would take a few small tutorials to learn the basics of C#, to do that what visual scripting does for you. On the UE4 forums, I called this crap a "toy" that a professional never really would use. And guess what? Seems I'm right. Autodesk got itself Lua in addition to Flow.

Autodesk points out the pro/cons of visual scripting VS text based scripting in their documentation about Flow (visual scarping) and its Lua scripting for Stingray, very well. And that's why Stingray got a text based scripting language in the first place. Lua reminds me of F#. It got similar code noise reduction. C# source code looks quite "fat" compared to Lua or F#. However, I never would have had a problem with BPs in UE4, if those Epic jokers only supported a text based scripting language in addition to C++.

Xamarin is actively working on bringing C#/F# to UE4. However, I witnessed the kindergarden grade IQ of UE4 "devs". So, before I go back to UE4, I will think trice. And now with Stingray in the market. I would rather choose Autodesk over UE4. I tried Stingray yesterday. The editor and the visual scripting is equal or better than UE4. But of course that was only a first impression.

 

Hey Unity. . . want to buy another engine!!!???

 

And if it doesn't mean anything, then that's all the more reason to get out!

The only conceivable reason not to be looking for a new job is if they have The Next Big Thing just about ready to release, and they really believe in it. And even then it's iffy.

 

See my comment about rdeundancy above. Sometime staying on a sinking ship till the bitter end pays out.

 

I've got a new headline: "Unity employees say they’re not being paid!"

*hysteric laughter*

It's disturbing if I see code that seem to be more disfigured then what I may pull out of my ass as an intermediate level programmer. So, now is the time for Unity to strike and hire some CryEngine techies! Then all is forgiven...

Do you know why the CryEngine is called CryEngine? Because when you make a game with it, it makes you cry. You may have heard of this joke. We better be careful what we wish for.

 

For everyone wondering why employees didn't just quit:

 

Wow no wonder

 

What is the really going on here that could result in this happening?
Not managing funds correctly during development?
Creating a game which is too buggy?
Creating a game which will/does not have a high-enough user base?
Too much competition?

 

The first Crysis was their best game. At the time had amazin tech and was the benchmark game for graphics. "Can it run Crysis?"

After that what made the first so good was the open ended island nature they opted in for more linear experience with 2 & 3...which were far from why people loved the first one!

What else they make Ryse and some VR games dont know how thet kept afloat all this time...

How about repurpose their engine for mobile games...

 

Is "one full salary" per month or per year?

 

Three months.

 

Why does it have to be simpler? That's just the usual detractor's assumption. It's another mode for programming. You can program with an IDE (Visual Studio 2015 has a 5GB+ install), or inside Unity using your mouse.

It's far better for smaller things. Make an object rotate on its Y axis:

Bad (current)

• Create script (making sure no file name conflicts)
• Wait to compile
• Type out variables and transform.Rotate
• Wait to compile
• Play

Better

• Add graph to GameObject using some mechanism Unity come up with. Could simply be adding a single component.
• Insert Update/Rotate block and create variable.
• Play

Unity could also add in an FSM into it if they felt like it.

 

Yeah i know about that actually, what i mean is they can take they tech and improve and reimplement the tech to unity engine, not using the cryengine directly. it do make you cry.

 

The biggest problem is their recent games have not been big enough hits to generate enough money to cash flow positive. AAA game development requires an army of coders and artists to work for several years at a time. For example, "Ryse: Son of Rome" sold well below expectations.

 

Good thing they've got ingratiating lunatic Merkel at the helm giving away Germany and turning it into the turd world faster than a leftist snowflake evaporating in the Sahara desert.

 

Thank god we have amazon lumberyard.... oh no wait meh

 

What a shame, not only for employee's but for indie's too. End of the day CE is the only realtime semi-performant engine on the market today. If nothing else, it's a prime of example of what happens when you ignore constructive feedback and out of any engine CE had the potential to be on top for 3D.

If they would of taken into account all the workflow improvements suggested by community users over the years, this wouldn't even be a topic to discuss. Prime examples are CE 5 at release time, they optimised the crap out of it and implemented state of the art rendering / lighting (like SVOTI) / implemented C# things were getting exciting.

After all that work they'd not bothered to implement a fully working .FBX import system. Out of all those things, I'd of thought the .FBX pipline would be one of the simplest with the highest user gain?? When I tried it out terrain was dissapearing at run time, there were bugs left right and centre and still the old painful workflow. I can live without some feature's for useability, no point in having cutting rendering if you can't make games in it.

Neither is there a need to suffer when other engines can get you most of the way there anyway..

 

You have to compile BPs as well. It's just faster in UE4 than C++, but not really faster than C#. And regarding the typing, well yes. C# is a fat ass of some kind. F# or Lua is way better with its code noise reduction that don't force you to type down silly stuff like a semicolon every freaking time.

 

It's not dead yet. A few hours ago they released 5.3 which seems to have some big features for a company that's not paying employees. A new Blueprint like system, C# refactoring, additional features to the FBX import, PhysX, in editor Asset Window, switch away from WAF, etc.

It makes me wonder how many employees overall are not being paid. Could it be just a select few aren't since they can rely on Germany's insolvency money so they could use the funding elsewhere? Even so, it's worth worrying about if a company can't afford to pay their employees regardless of if they are being "strategic" or not.

 

and look - here are C# entities - dead simple IMHO:

 

Nice to see that CryEngineV is not gold brown toast just yet.