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What just happened? Crytek is the latest company impacted by an ongoing wave of tech industry layoffs reminiscent of the financial crisis it endured a decade ago. Although the disruption won't affect content updates for the successful Hunt: Showdown 1896, the fate of Crysis 4 has been cast into doubt.
Crytek, best known for Crysis and Hunt: Showdown 1896, recently announced that it has laid off around 60 employees, or about 15 percent of its workforce. Furthermore, the company paused development on Crysis 4 sometime during the third quarter of last year.
The affected employees came from Crytek's development staff and shared services department. The decision followed other unspecified cost-cutting measures. The company has promised severance packages and job assistance services.
– Crytek (@Crytek) February 12, 2025Crytek has shifted resources toward Hunt: Showdown 1896, which continues receiving rapid content updates. The multiplayer first-person shooter recently received a significant overhaul.
However, it has been the only fresh game in Crytek's wheelhouse since its initial launch in 2019. After releasing remasters of the three main Crysis games in 2020 and 2021, the company announced Crysis 4 in early 2022. Only a logo was revealed, indicating the sequel was still in early development, and no new information on the title has emerged in the three years since.
Although the original Far Cry in 2004 put Crytek on the map, the first Crysis game in 2007 made the company infamous for pushing the technological envelope. With graphics that crushed even the most expensive PCs and stood head and shoulders above the rest of that year's star-studded lineup, the jungle-themed FPS still maintains a memetic status.
Our 2020 analysis of the game shed new light on the arguably unreasonable tasks it demanded from CPUs and GPUs. Crytek recently told PC Gamer that it deliberately optimized the highest graphics settings for PCs predicted to exist three years after launch. They probably shouldn't have been surprised when players immediately tried playing it on ultra settings.
While still technologically forward-looking, Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 made compromises to accommodate the then-aging PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and didn't have quite the same impact as the original. Following the release of Crysis 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome in 2013, Crytek struggled to secure funding, leading to payment gaps and a significant loss of staff. Hunt: Showdown 1896 appears to be keeping Crytek afloat for now, but other projects like a new Crysis could bring some needed diversity to Germany's largest game studio.
Larger companies affected by layoffs over the past year include Sony, EA, Tesla, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, and Google.
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