Crysis 4 ‘on hold’ as studio cuts 15% of staff

Crytek has put Crysis 4 “on hold” as it lays off around 60 staff, around 15% of its 400 person company. Some staff working on the future of Crysis has shifted to work on Hunt: Showdown 1896, a multiplayer shooter released in 2019 that remains quite popular — and, even, grown exponentially since its release, hitting its all-time peak concurrent players (more than 60,000), in August. Despite the success of Hunt: Showdown 1896, Crytek said it can’t “continue as before” and “remain financially sustainable.” “Like so many of our peers, we aren’t immune to the complex, unfavorable market dynamics that have hit our industry these past several years,” a Crytek representative wrote in a post on social media. “The layoffs affect development teams and shared services.” [Media: https://twitter.com/Crytek/status/1889623029723885913] The German developer attempted to “reduce costs and cut operating expenses,” but called the layoffs “inevitable,” its Wednesday post said. The studio will offer severance packages to laid-off employees. Crysis 4 was announced in 2022 as being in early development. Crytek released a short teaser in which the company called Crysis 4 a “truly next-gen shooter.” Alongside the video, Crytek also put out a call for new hires: It was looking for “people who will truly shape the future of the franchise.” The company has shared very few details on the game since then. Crysis 3 was released in 2013, the last new game the franchise gotten since then. Electronic Arts published each of these three games. Crytek, however, did release remastered versions of the first three games, released in 2020 and 2021. Despite the success of the franchise and Hunt: Showdown 1896, Crytek has, indeed, faced financial issues in the past: In 2016, Crytek employees told Polygon some employees hadn’t been paid in months — something that echoed complaints from 2014 in which then-CEO Cevat Yerli said the missed payments were designed to keep the company out of bankruptcy. As Crytek alluded, the video game industry continues to struggle after years of financial woes and layoffs. Tens of thousands of workers were laid off over the past three years; nearly 1,000 of which were laid off in the first two months of 2025, per unofficially collected data.