Crytek Cutting Five Studios After Pay Issues

Last week, it was reported that a former Crytek FX artist was suing the company over unpaid wages. The artist had even set up a GoFundMe page (now missing) to raise money to pay for the lawsuit. According to the artist, the developer of games such as Warface had been behind on payments or simply not issued them since May of this year.

Now, Crytek has announced that it will be eliminating five of its studios — those in Budapest, Sofia, Seoul, Shanghai, and Istanbul — and redirecting its energies. Note, we say “eliminating” because at this point it is unclear if the company has plans to close or sell these studios, or do something else with them altogether. They have, however, stated that the remaining two studios will be working on “premium IPs”. This, of course, begs the question as to whether or not they will be dropping all the free-to-play games and going back to buy- or pay-to-play as their official revenue model.

At present, we don’t have the answer to that question, but suspect there will be official details sometime after the new year.