Take Crysis into space and give us spaceships.

And stop thinking that graphics are 70% of the game's content and everything else is 30% total games content, like they did with crysis 3.

Orientation changed towards publishing and free to play? And they think they'll save themselves? 🙄

If they didn't get funding, then, they would be issuing a completely different press release. This doesn't change anything, is essentially what they are saying. They done messed up, hired the wrong people to oversee two multi-million $ products and put everyone's jobs on the line. In the process they culled staff and left a dirty stain on the games industry. Shocking, really, that a company with such solid franchises could make mistakes of this nature, and even whilst they are happening. Was part of their thought process along the lines of 'hey, if it all goes wrong we got golden parachutes written into our contracts, or we could simply get funding from somewhere else to wipe our behinds and bail us out'. If these options were not on the table, they would never, ever, be in the position they are. I hate to raise 2008, but I suspect the same thing applied to them as well. A fish rots from the head down.

Keep riding the console hype... to your doom

As much as I'd want to see that, it will never happen! Too many people not bothering with and not putting up with a gaming pc rather than an average, yet out of the box gaming experience with a console. Too many copies of games selling on those too... that's why I don't think publishing will save them (that business is rather harsh, even worse than actually produce a game I think), and neither will free to play / pay 2 win (the most user-unfriendly concept I know).

As much as I'd want to see that, it will never happen! Too many people not bothering with and not putting up with a gaming pc rather than an average, yet out of the box gaming experience with a console. Too many copies of games selling on those too... that's why I don't think publishing will save them (that business is rather harsh, even worse than actually produce a game I think), and neither will free to play / pay 2 win (the most user-unfriendly concept I know).

My 2 most favorite games are F2P (Path of Exile, Smite) where you pay for cosmetics/effects only. Now I play little bit Dead Island: Epidemic, but even while in closed beta, they have micro transaction based on P2W principle and entire game is directed to support P2W too strongly. Nice game, but it is bound to make some money and then die out. Another P2W game is Star Conflict, but its P2W method does not give very much and is not unbalanced as it's much more about skill than premium. Another game which may be considered P2W is Prime World, but there you really have to pay only if you want to undo your big mistakes in binding top gear to character which will not benefit from it. So there are P2W games which you can enjoy and be more than competitive without paying single $. But in general most of companies underestimate ethical F2P donations as they will not push people away and people love vanity items.

F2P is the way forward. I play World of Tanks, War Thunder, League of Legends and Defiance now that it's gone F2P. I've given all these games about equal amounts of cash, maybe about 60-70 pound because those are a few of the F2P games that aren't really P2W and they are well supported. I play some other F2P games as well but never felt the need to spend money on them. If i spend certain amount of hours playing a game then it deserves to be paid for it's service. Especially when you start getting up to 10-20 hours of game play. I mean it's a good question really, how many hours would be enough to decide whether you like a game or not. Is 10 hours enough or too much. I drop small amounts of cash on these games over a period of time, this way you are in full control of the amount you think a certain game deserves.

I think these companies need to get back to the days where they had a strong single player. Have one studio making a good single player game,have another studio focusing on multiplayer. F this free to play bs! We need some new and fresh idea's,not rehashed crap..COD anyone? How did Ryse do Crytek? Get back to what you do best. 1st person shooters for the PC,then port it to console! I will not pay to win. I want to pay for a great game!

Free-to-Play is a huge money maker for publishers. The premise is quantity not quality. Casual gamers think nothing of dropping a dollar here, a dollar there. Positive cash flow is quick and continuous. That is why there is such a move towards that business model. All that is needed is a sustainable positive cash flow. Just need enough positive cash flow to meet the immediate outflow requirements to keep operating. Like I have said before, they are a private company so all one has to go on is either rumors or actual statements like the one given. Until someone reports that their CFO is jumping ship, business as usual; everything else is just common day to day operations.

Free-to-Play is a huge money maker for publishers. The premise is quantity not quality. Casual gamers think nothing of dropping a dollar here, a dollar there. Positive cash flow is quick and continuous. That is why there is such a move towards that business model. All that is needed is a sustainable positive cash flow. Just need enough positive cash flow to meet the immediate outflow requirements to keep operating. Like I have said before, they are a private company so all one has to go on is either rumors or actual statements like the one given. Until someone reports that their CFO is jumping ship, business as usual; everything else is just common day to day operations.

The problem with free to play is that 10% of those games take 90% of all the income generated by those kind of games, meaning that most companies are fighting for scrapes and going down sooner or later... I think free to play only works really well on cell phones because ppl don´t want to spend money on games for cell phones, at least directly. As for Crytek, i think their only salvation is going back to their roots and what they did best and gave them their success in the frist place...

The companies that go under do not understand the premise they are getting into bed with. They need to output quantity. Milking a single title is not success in that market.

As long as the games they publish get enough attention, then there shouldn't be much of an issue. Isn't Monster Hunter Online being published by Crytek? I know its going to use CryEngine 3. If so, it would be awesome if its not region locked to the Asian countries.

The companies that go under do not understand the premise they are getting into bed with. They need to output quantity. Milking a single title is not success in that market.

It's an interesting point. Since the video games industry is like the movie industry, the parallels here would be a movie company trying to output two $250m movie once a year. This is not the way it works. A movie company will have one mega budget movie and then in increasing quantity down the budget graph; make smaller films. Games publishers pretty much to the same, like EA. As Crytek hedged their bets on two titles/franchises, and put the wrong people/person at the top to manage it/them, they are in the position they are in now. What they should have done is have (if I'm hearing you right) more lower budget titles (tablet/mobile) as their bread and butter, with a few mid-level-last-gen titles, and then perhaps one AAA game. Instead, it appears to put all their $ into two AAA games, both of which either didn't make the grade, didn't sell, or worse, were in development hell. I mean...seriously...who the blazes would sign off on a AAA Roman empire game in an age when angry birds is making stoopid amounts of cash? I got a tablet game idea: it's a puzzle game involving a new thing I'll call 2D and it uses lots colourful graphics. Every time you do something good it plays a uplifting ZING! noise and every time you do something wrong, it plays a downbeat dull monotone BLOOP! You get 5 levels for free, including leader-boards for your Facebook friends to see and every week a new level gets released for $1, which rises to $2 after the first week. When you download it and install it, it'll play ZING!ZING!ZING! with lots of golden sparkles on the screen. You'll also be automatically put as a 'game leader' on Facebook. For extra sell-through, the game will have an animated cat telling you how awesome you are when you win, and will PURR at you - when you lose it will GROWL and walk off screen. Srsly...this idea could make Crytek more money than anything they have before. The name of this game? Simple, "Cat-Ching" (TM).

It's an interesting point. ...What they should have done is have (if I'm hearing you right) more lower budget titles (tablet/mobile) as their bread and butter, with a few mid-level-last-gen titles, and then perhaps one AAA game...

Exactly. Transitioning to this free-to-play model, they would have been better off by leveraging the financing of the AAA titles with the cash flow from the free-to-play titles.

If i spend certain amount of hours playing a game then it deserves to be paid for it's service. Especially when you start getting up to 10-20 hours of game play. I mean it's a good question really, how many hours would be enough to decide whether you like a game or not. Is 10 hours enough or too much./QUOTE] 10 hours? Well, depending on how much you give, I'd expect much more from a game... I've spent 100h on FTL (price: 10€), 300 on Skyrim (60€), 500 on BF4 (120€), and 100 on EU4 (45€). I knew what Iwas going to get, paid the money, and enjoyed the time I spent with them. Nothing more upsetting than playing a free2play game only to see its pay2win, and that happened a few times to me. It's all just a matter of how many hours do you get out of the money you invest. And if I get something out of it, I don't have a problem paying. But with free games, and that's what free2play means to me, I should not pay anything to even reach a balance to other players. Back to topic though: Maybe Crytek should have produced / published more "low-quality" f2p titles to meet the ends, yet again, the companies want to increase the money they make... which is mostly done with big AAA titles selling millions of copies, rather than waiting for those f2p micro transactions to let the pay trickle in... So I don't see the need or the desire to make big gains in short time to be based on f2p / p2w games. And if you have financial problems, would you want to just go on with the little you make, to pay the bills, or would you want to gain a bit more to have some reserves for bad times? Also, I wonder if there are many f2p games on consoles? Because I believe consoles are the main market, with the biggest numbers of games sold and money made, or am I wrong?

The f2p model really only works because it hinges on people's laziness and desire to stand out above others. Most if not all f2p games really just boil down to pay to win. Because of that I never spend on f2p games even when I play them. I really only respect and spend for pay to play games (or buy to play) because when you demand people's money upfront you will be pressured to provide a good game/service, and failing to do so you are going to get punished one way or another. I really wish for a game that can provide me with an experience as good as or better than WoW. Not that I'm saying WoW is the best game ever, but its my example of the epitome of pay to play models. Its a game that at one point in time managed to convince 14 million people to fork out US$15 a month and if that doesn't spell financial success then I don't know what does. And its pretty damn clear how they managed to do it.

There's some truth to that, even if I wasn't a WoW gamer at any given time (played Guildwars because I liked the graphics more), they did something right to get so many people playing, and paying!

WoW was never free to play. That is outside of the point being made. The Free-to-Play model necessitates quantity to be pumped out to be successful. Combatting waning interest in the simplicity of those games is what drives the need for quantity. In essence you can blame games like WoW and EvE for giving birth to the concept of free-to-play. One cannot ignore that players exchanged real monies for items and characters on the unofficially created black markets. The success of those unofficial channels in essence is what allowed the thought of free-to-play to be contemplated. Those stupid Facebook games even showed there was monies to be made. Do not forget, this forum's readers are not even a statistical representation of the mass / mainstream market.

I know they aren't. And I believe the black market thing started with games like Diablo2, rather than WoW. And personally, that's the whole point of this thread, rather than a f2p discussion in essence, is that I don't even care if Crytek moves on to fb and f2p games, I say good riddance. Either they come back for pc gaming, or they stay for fb games or they go f2p, as the main tenor here is: nobody really sheds a tear for them.

Deep Silver have required the rights for Homefront: The Revolution. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/07/30/deep-silver-acquires-homefront-the-revolution-amid-crytek-woes/ Know wonder Crytek said that a new source of capital has secured its long-term future.

http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2014/07/30/crytek-u-k-is-closing-down-following-homefront-sale-while-austin-studio-suffers-layoffs/ http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2014/07/30/deep-silver-acquires-homefront-from-crytek-sequel-development-to-continue-at-new-studio/