DF Direct: Crysis 4’s uncertain future is a grim portend for the industry

News broke last week that Crytek was undergoing significant layoffs – and the next edition of the Crysis franchise faces an uncertain future. This downbeat topic got second billing on this week’s DF Direct, after the team’s exhaustive breakdown of Sony’s State of Play showcase the day before, and it’s an important story that I wanted to discuss in a little more detail here as the Direct goes live.

After all, Crysis is something of a tentpole game series for us at Digital Foundry, with a reputation for being an early adopter of graphics technologies that would later define entire generations of PC and console video games. That includes the likes of screen-space ambient occlusion, sub-surface scattering and ray-marched volumetric lighting, but you could write volumes about just how ground-breaking that first game was – and Alex did.

Crysis 3 and its Remastered counterpart have also long formed part of the DF test suite for CPU and GPU reviews – I think the “Highly Explosive Materials” train ride and the argument between Prophet and Psycho earlier on in Welcome to the Jungle are burned into my brain after so many benchmark runs. With that in mind, Crysis 4 was hotly anticipated by the whole team since the game was announced back in 2022, especially in an industry where self-made game engines are coming under threat from the ubiquity of Unreal Engine.

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:11 News 1: State of Play: Tides of Annihilation
• 0:09:37 MindsEye
• 0:16:38 Days Gone Remastered
• 0:22:28 Saros
• 0:29:12 Dreams of Another
• 0:36:59 Lost Soul Aside
• 0:41:39 Other games: Borderlands 4, Sonic Racing Crossworlds, Onimusha, Midnight Walk
• 0:59:34 State of Play – The Verdict
• 1:06:43 News 2: Crysis 4 put “on hold” as Crytek lays off employees
• 1:16:24 News 3: Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC specs revealed
• 1:36:32 News 4: Astro Bot gets PS5 Pro upgrade
• 1:42:59 Supporter Q1: After three months, what do you think of the PS5 Pro and PSSR?
• 1:52:53 Supporter Q2: Why don’t more developers use CryEngine?
• 1:59:40 Supporter Q3: Will Nvidia “gate” new AI features to their most recent hardware?
• 2:09:17 Supporter Q4: Does RTX Mega Geometry eliminate the need for proxy geometry for RT?
• 2:15:17 Supporter Q5: Could Oliver address some of the recent state of the art AI tech?
• 2:26:52 Supporter Q6: How much do you need to spend on a GPU to have a good experience?

Now the prospect of a new mainline Crysis entry seems further away than ever. The Crytek layoffs are significant, corresponding to around 60 people or 15 percent of the company’s workforce, and come after Crysis 4 director Mattias Engström left in November last year, returning to Hitman developer IO Interactive. As well as the immediate effect to the livelihoods of the affected developers, it’s difficult to imagine that the current Crysis 4 project will be restarted in the near future given the circumstances. The focus of the studio’s remaining developers has shifted to live service extraction shooter Hunt: Showdown 1896, as the studio aims to become “financially sustainable“.

As Alex mentions in the Direct, Crytek has faced challenges even as far back as Crysis 2, despite the relative popularity of its engine and the reasonable success of its games. The engine’s (largely undeserved) reputation for poor performance hurt pickup by console developers, and these days, CryEngine is less common than it used to be – despite being used as the basis for the recently released Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The company’s forays into multiple studios and VR releases don’t look to have paid off in the way that studio executives probably hoped either, and it’s not clear whether the recent Crysis remasters made back their investment. Despite this, Crytek was listed as the largest single game developer in Germany as recently as mid 2024.

It’s clear that while Crysis 4 could have been the shot in the arm the studio needed, major game releases are getting increasingly more time-consuming and expensive to produce – especially if you also have to ship the next major version of your in-house game engine to meet expectations as a boundary-pushing PC release. The weight of expectation for Crysis in particular almost approaches that of Half-Life amongst PC fans, so it’s perhaps not surprising that Crysis 4’s development has been protracted at best.

Going forward, perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Crysis 4 development team is tasked with creating a smaller-scale Crysis spin-off, something that can use whatever technologies and assets were already in some stage of development without the corresponding expectations of numbered sequel. If that performed well enough – and perhaps put CryEngine back on the radar of studios that don’t want to go with the mainstream choice of Unreal – that could be sufficient to spur a resumption of Crysis 4.

There’s also the possibility that Crytek itself is absorbed by a larger company if its financial situation doesn’t improve. A Tencent takeover was mooted in 2021 that ultimately didn’t come to pass, but there are a few other companies that would no doubt be glad to acquire the company’s talented developers, its engine and other technologies – and the prospect of outside investment and ceding of control may be preferable to the studio shuttering entirely.

Regardless of Crytek and Crysis 4’s eventual fate, this news is another troubling indictment of the current state of the games industry. Success stories like Balatro, Baldur’s Gate 3 and even Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 prove that it is possible to create great games at a variety of scales, but it increasingly feels like the traditional “triple-A” model is on the way out. Maybe that’s a good thing, if it leads to a more sustainable industry and gives Crytek a route forward, but the loss of a full-fat Crysis 4 would still be hard to take.