Crytek

Crytek
Information
Type	Private company
Industry	Video games, Game engine software
Founded	1999
Founder	Cevat Yerli, Avni Yerli, Faruk Yerli
Headquarters	Frankfurt, Germany
Notable Personnel	Avni Yerli (Co-CEO), Faruk Yerli (Co-CEO), Cevat Yerli (founder)
Products	CryEngine, Far Cry, Crysis series, Ryse: Son of Rome, Warface, Hunt: Showdown, The Climb, The Climb 2, Robinson: The Journey
Website	https://www.crytek.com

Crytek is a German video game developer and game engine maker based in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded in 1999 by the Turkish-German brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk Yerli, and it develops the CryEngine in-house. The company is best known for the first-person shooters Far Cry (2004) and the Crysis series, and for the cooperative shooter Hunt: Showdown.

In virtual reality, Crytek released three titles between 2016 and 2021: the rock-climbing game The Climb and the dinosaur-planet adventure Robinson: The Journey, both in 2016, followed by the sequel The Climb 2 in 2021. The company also added native VR rendering to CryEngine, supporting the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.

History

Founding and early engine work

Cevat Yerli started the company that became Crytek in 1997 and incorporated it formally in 1999 in Coburg, Germany; his brothers Faruk and Avni joined in 2000 and 2001. One of its first projects was a technology demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island, which showed off long view distances and drew the attention of Nvidia at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo. That engine technology became the basis of the company's first commercial game, Far Cry, published by Ubisoft in 2004, and of the CryEngine that the studio went on to license to other developers.

Crytek moved its headquarters to Frankfurt in 2006. Over the following years it opened and later closed several studios abroad, including offices in Budapest, Seoul, Shanghai, Sofia (Crytek Black Sea, sold to Sega in 2017), and Nottingham (Crytek UK, formerly Free Radical Design, sold to Deep Silver in 2014). It retained studios in Kyiv, Ukraine and Istanbul, Turkey.

Crysis and licensing CryEngine

The studio released Crysis in 2007, followed by Crysis Warhead (2008), Crysis 2 (2011), and Crysis 3 (2013). It branched into other genres with the free-to-play shooter Warface (2013) and the Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome (2013). Alongside its own games, Crytek licensed CryEngine to outside studios as a commercial engine.

In June 2014 the company missed wage payments to staff and described itself as in a transitional phase while it secured financing for online games, a period during which it sold or closed several of its overseas studios. On 28 February 2018 Cevat Yerli stepped down as chief executive, and his brothers Avni and Faruk Yerli became joint CEOs; Cevat remained a major shareholder.

Recent status

Crytek's main ongoing game is the cooperative shooter Hunt: Showdown, first released in 2019 and relaunched in 2024 as Hunt: Showdown 1896. In late 2024 the company put development of Crysis 4, which it had announced in January 2022, on hold and laid off about 15 percent of its roughly 400 staff, saying it could not continue as before and remain financially sustainable while it shifted resources to Hunt.

Virtual reality

Crytek began VR work as consumer headsets approached release in the mid-2010s. It added Oculus Rift support to CryEngine with version 3.8.1, released in 2016, and built out fuller VR support in later versions. The studio framed its early VR games partly as a way to prove that CryEngine was viable for VR and to give its developers in-house experience designing for the medium.

The Climb

The Climb is a first-person rock-climbing game in which the player scales cliff faces by gripping handholds, jumping between positions, and swapping hands to ascend. Crytek announced it as an Oculus Rift exclusive in December 2015, and it launched in 2016 alongside the consumer Rift, built on CryEngine. It launched with Xbox One controller support and added Oculus Touch motion-controller support later in 2016 when Touch became available.

Robinson: The Journey

Robinson: The Journey is a first-person science-fiction adventure in which the player takes the role of Robin, a boy stranded on a dinosaur-filled planet called Tyson III, accompanied by a robot companion named HIGS. Crytek developed it in CryEngine and released it first on PlayStation VR on 8 November 2016, then on Oculus Rift and Steam on 9 February 2017 at a price of 39.99 US dollars. Support for the HTC Vive and Oculus Touch controllers was added after the initial release. The soundtrack was composed by Jesper Kyd.

The Climb 2

The Climb 2 is the sequel to The Climb, adding urban skyscraper settings alongside natural peaks, new maps, dynamic objects such as ropes and ladders, and asynchronous multiplayer competition. Crytek developed and published it as a standalone title for the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, and released it on 4 March 2021 at 29.99 US dollars.

CryEngine and VR support

CryEngine is Crytek's proprietary game engine, used in the studio's own games and licensed to third-party developers. Starting with CryEngine V, the engine includes virtual reality support for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR, with vendor implementations provided as individual plugins from CryEngine 5.3 onward. VR rendering is enabled by adding a VR plugin (such as the OpenVR plugin) to a project and setting a system configuration flag. The engine has also supported the OSVR open-source headset framework through a dedicated plugin. Crytek used CryEngine's VR features in its own VR titles, which functioned in part as demonstrations of the engine's capability for the medium.