The German company Crytek, famous for the CryEngine engine and the Crysis series of games, delays the salaries of its employees.
This was reported with reference to their own sources by several English-language publications at once.
The Polygon source informs that Crytek employees have not received salaries for two months now, and before that they received it with a delay of two to four weeks for five months.
An employee of the company from the Frankfurt office of the gaming company told KitGuru that the problems began in June when it became clear that the salary would not be transferred on time. Crytek management promised that the situation would improve in August, but no money was paid to employees at all for October and November.
Those who have not yet left the company from the Frankfurt office have written an official letter to the management, in which they threaten to stop working if they are not paid salaries in recent months. The employees of the Budapest office have already stopped working.
A source from the Bulgarian Crytek division told Let’s Play Video Games journalists that employees have not seen money for three months now. This affects both specialists and studio managers.
Crytek employs 700 employees in 6 offices. The main project of the company today remains the online shooter Warface, its operator in Russia is Mail.Ru Group, and in China Tencent. In addition to him, two more MMO projects are in development: a cooperative shooter Hunt and a MOBA under the name Arena of Fate. The KitGuru source assures that the last two projects will not see the light, and the studios in Shanghai and Sofia will be sold.
It is not known how much the company receives from deductions for using another of its projects – the CryEngine engine – but it is distributed according to a non-standard “pay as much as you want” model (it implies that you can not pay for access to its full functionality at all). In 2015, the company sold the license for the engine to Amazon. According to rumors, it cost buyers from $ 50 million to $ 70 million.
In 2014, Crytek had previously delayed salaries. Then their CEO of the company, Cevat Yerli, explained this by the need to save the company from bankruptcy.
Sources: Polygon, KitGuru, Let’s Play Video Games