It’s a bad day to be working for Crytek Austin.
Earlier today it emerged that Crytek would be transferring the Homefront IP to Koch Media and appears to have effectively sold Crytek Nottingham to Koch / Deep Silver. The latest statement phrases it as “the Homefront team from Crytek’s Nottingham studio [will] transfer their talents to Koch Media in compliance with English law.”
No financial details of the proposed acquisition have been released.
As well as selling off Homefront, Crytek appears to be radically reducing the scale of it’s Austin studio. Austin will continue to exist with “several staff members maintaining the CRYENGINE support team to assist North American licensees,” but development of the title Hunt: Horrors of the Guilded Age will be moving over to Frankfurt. That’s not good news for anybody currently employed at Austin. The company, again, doesn’t offer any specific job cut numbers, but does note that staff will be “invited to apply for new positions at Crytek in Germany.”
This is especially unfortunate, because a proportion of the Austin staff were formerly Vigil Games; a studio caught up in the 2013 THQ bankruptcy.
“We would like to thank all our staff – past and present – in both Nottingham and Austin for their contributions to the company, and we wish all the very best to anyone who may no longer be under the Crytek banner moving forward,” says CEO Cevat Yerli, euphemistically referring to job losses as “no longer being under the banner” like a champion of corporate double-speak.
Crytek’s studios in Budapest, Istanbul, Kiev and Sofia are said to continue operations as usual. “A closer collaboration between Crytek’s studios in Shanghai and Seoul is under review,” the statement adds.
So, from their initial position of denying any financial trouble, Crytek has now shut down two studios and sold the Homefront IP.
