Cevat Yerli has offered some interesting insights into the recent troubles over at Crytek. In a recent interview the studio's founder and CEO explained the recent delays to staff payment, as well revealing the reason behind the sale of Crytek UK and the Homefront IP.
"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," he explained.
"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."
Rough numbers stated by Yerli during the interview suggests that even with downsizing and the sales of Crytek UK (to Koch Media), the company overall is 700 employees strong. Yerli also believes that no more parts of the business will be sold off:
"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," he said, before later adding that the studio didn't need to offload Crytek UK, saying that they did so for strategic reasons.
"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."
One of the games mentioned in the discussion, Ryse: Son of Rome, is heading to PC later this year it has been confirmed recently. Yerli also stated that a cross-platform sequel is also possible in the future, but only once new-gen platforms have picked up.
"We are not 100 per cent happy with Xbox One sales right now," he admitted. "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," he said, before adding that it wouldn't have to be an Xbox-exclusive: "We can do whatever we want with it with whoever we want."
You can read the full interview if you want a more detailed insight to recent events over at the company and their plans moving forward.
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