Crytek-grundaren och bossen Cevat Yerli har i en intervju delat med sig av sin syn på de problem som företaget haft den senaste tiden, samt även förklarat varför de sålde Homefront-varumärket och gjorde sig av med Crytek UK.
"You have two choices, right? Either you delay payments - again delay... it's not that they didn't get paid, they got delayed - delay payments and salvage the company. Or, you push your cash flow directly to the studios and you file for insolvency. Both options are really bad. So you have to make the better of the two bad decisions."
Yerli förklarar att alla anställda kompenserats för olägenheterna kring betalningarna:
"However, like we had promised to everybody - and we said the company is not at a big risk, not a danger, it just needs more time to salvage it and that's what we did. Now, everybody got paid plus inconvenience payments additionally to that, like we promised everybody. Some people were very impatient and got angry at the smallest delay."
Grovt räknat jobbar runt 700 personer hos Crytek idag, även efter att Crytek UK lagts ner. Yerli menar dock att det inte är uteslutet att det behövs trimmas ytterligare:
"Selling studios I would think is not going happen any more. But anything else I can't say right now. My gut feeling would be maybe not, but I just can't say."
"We didn't need to do this. We didn't need to downsize our company. Maybe this didn't come across. We didn't need to sell Homefront. That deal would have secured Crytek's future even if it would have added another 100 people on top of where we were before we sold Homefront or changed Austin's direction. It is an optimisation stage that we said we should do strategically right now in order to focus short term our mindset on the launch of Warface, Arena of Fate and Hunt. It wasn't a pure commercial deal. It was a strategic deal for focus. We didn't need to sell Homefront or the UK office."
Ett av de spel som diskuteras mer ingående i intervjun är Ryse: Son of Rome, vilket som bekant kommer till PC senare detta år. Yerli berättade bland annat att det kan bli tal om en uppföljare till fler format, men inte förrän försäljningen av de nya konsolerna ökat.
"We are not 100 per cent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait till the current gen and next gen catches up. For Ryse 2, we aren't saying it's cancelled. It's our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen. We can do whatever we want with it with whoever we want."
Tack Eurogamer
