“Over a third” of Crytek UK’s ~150 employees left during Crytek’s 2014 financial struggles, then-game director Hasit Zala has revealed, after “quite a few” of them went unpaid “for weeks”.
Discussing the exodus with The Guardian, Zala described how he tried to “hold the studio together” throughout Crytek’s difficulties, and how Deep Silver’s belief in upcoming shooter Homefront: The Revolution helped save the studio from going under.
“In the summer of 2014, Crytek ran into financial trouble,” Zala said. “As time went on, promises went back and forth, and we got to the stage where the staff hadn’t been paid for quite some time. I was busy trying to hold the studio together, and I needed to look at its long-term future. Deep Silver stepped in, saying they believed in the game, believed in the team, and were really concerned with the way things were going, because it looked like the team might completely dissolve, and the game may never see the light of day. So it approached Crytek, and a buyout ensued.”
Deep Silver announced that it had acquired Crytek UK and the Homefront IP for an undisclosed sum in July 2014, weeks after rumours of Crytrek’s financial difficulties began to swirl. It renamed the studio Deep Silver Dambuster Studios and kept the team on to continue working on Homefront: The Revolution, with Zala taking over as studio head.
“We’re still the team that started working on this game back in 2011,” Zala added. “Although in 2014, we were a studio of 150-odd people, quite a few of whom hadn’t been paid for weeks; they had mortgages, wives and families – so over a third of the team left at that stage. When we started Dambuster, there was a bit of rebuilding that had to be done. But it’s the same studio: I sit in the same place, and it’s the same code base.”
Days after the acquisition, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli told Eurogamer that the company had two options when it came to paying staff: “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.
“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.”
He added that some staff “were very impatient and got angry at the smallest delay”, and claimed that the company had discussed “potentially rough times” with its studios’ staff. “And we had even shared with people how they should maybe work with different banks at a personal level to prepare,” he said. “Or, if not, they could make a choice to resign and look for other jobs.”
Homefront: The Revolution launches on PS4, Xbox One and PC on May 20.
Source: theguardian.com
