Crytek has not paid wages, employees are leaving
kitguru.net
kitguru.net
Edit: Looks like it's since been unflagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140938
> Crytek haven't paid their employees in Bulgaria in 3 months and all workers in that office are currently owed 3 full salaries. The company is not looking to pay these salaries any time soon and have spent the last few months lying about the availability of this money in order to keep as many employees as possible. > The Yerli brothers (Avni, Cevat and Faruk) are now looking at the second delay in the last 6 months (after finishing up a delay of 2 months just before the current one) and the third payment delay in the last two years.
> The former director of the Sofia studio, Vesselin Handjiev, left several months ago and the studio is entirely at the mercy of Crytek Frankfurt's leadership, which has proved to be unsuccessful in stemming the current bleeding for 6 months.
> Anyone who has an offer or is otherwise considering joining Crytek is advised to steer their ship elsewhere, as the current situation is rumored to apply to all studios within the company, even after the closure and selling off of several of the Crytek studios around the world.
Some users flagged it and other users vouched for it, which is one way for a story to get unflagged.
Games got me into computer science, but after reading articles and talking to people I know who went down that route, I'm glad I never got into it. Don't get me wrong, the engines and games people design are amazing and I still enjoy playing them, but it takes a toll on the designers for sure.
Three and a half years later, however, I was tired of the job I had and wanted to try something new. I'd heard some great things about a local game studio and decided to check it out. I've now been working at Ghost Games for nearly two years and it feels like one of the best decision I've ever made.
A key point here is that EA has undergone a lot of changes these last few years and are really pushing to get away from the old ways of burning through talent like it's firewood to fuel the game making machinery. I don't know how far other EA studios have come, but DICE and Ghost (which is sort of a DICE subsidiary) have become great places to work.
I mean CV gets to be a thing more and more where these people are probably useful, but that is not the biggest market (yet).
Probably only ~100 of those jobs across Europe at the moment, though.
Are you including finance, aerospace, etc, all the big floating-point users, in that total?
If an engineer has a habit of working on fundamental, slow-moving, hard-problem projects, I wouldn't hire him for a project with almost no hard engineering, but a lot of quick iteration and good knowledge of product space — i.e. almost any gameplay programming job, for example. It's just a completely different world.
I believe Amazon uses CryEngine for Lumberyard. Amazon must have given them a deal so bad that they end up bankrupt if the software isn't adopted.
More cynically, it's a deal structured to ruin them and make them cheaper to acquire. I don't think that's the case though.
The AAA scene is using their own engines or the unreal engine. While you can switch engines when creating a new game the incentive isn't there when you either already have licenses for the unreal engine and a small army of programmers who have mastered it.
People were expecting a shit to Unreal when they decided to make it free for education/take a 5 % cut. This shift hasn't happened...
https://steamdb.info/app/252850/graphs/
The game was free until November 18th 9am PST, so the current active ~100 daily players is more representative of its success.
Games are an insanely huge market and Xbox seems to have been amazing at keeping the Microsoft brand relevant in the consumer space.
Contrast this to a group like Windows or Office where Microsoft knows they will be making billions of dollars off of it over the next 10 years, even if they also know it's in decline.
They've demonstrated time and again their inability to ship actual games. Their tech, once almost without peer, has long been matched and surpassed by Unreal and Unity. Their authoring tools are far behind. Their IPs (Crysis mainly) can sustain a 50-100 person studio maybe, but not the global empire they tried to build. Valuable employees have left over the years (see: the new Doom) and this wave of articles does not inspire confidence about the rest.
The Yerli brothers should shut the whole thing down, keep the Crysis IP to themselves, hunker down for a few years, then try a nostalgia-driven Crysis reboot with a 20-person team on top of somebody else's tech.
Crytek focused too much on pretty graphics and not enough on anything else that is important to the larger experience of developing a game. Shiny graphics and cool fringe features are nice, but an engine is supposed to help you get a game done faster and without reinventing wheels.
Building an engine to be the wheels for other people is hard. Most of the time you build an engine, you make it work well for a specific game or subset of games you make. It seems like everything in an engine should be and can be generic, but that's not really true. Once you try to make things super generic, you start to make tons of sacrifices either for the sake of makings things easier or at least repeatable. The issue is that as you move farther towards abstractions away from the original problems, you complicate everything and the end result is actually often less productivity (more steps, more hoops, etc), less performance, or even having to drop features altogether. Specialization is often looked at as something terrible in programming by some people (my code should be reusable!), but it really can make a huge difference in performance and features-specific contexts like games.
There's also a difference as well between building an engine for yourself and selling one. If anything, I'd argue that Crytek may have done a pretty OK job for the former, but egregiously failed doing the latter.
If you're selling an expensive game engine, you need to do at least some of the following:
* Provide reasonably understandable source
* Offer good support, especially in English
* Stable, highly adaptable tooling
* Wide support of popular formats
* Clean, adaptable, fast asset pipeline
* Community support and interaction
* Cross-platform tooling/compilation options
* Integration points for custom code, middleware, etc.
* Ability to patch/fork the engine itself within reason when needed
* Avoid huge amounts of allocations
* Use fast or safe allocators or provide the ability to do so
* Provide useful feedback during debugging, logging, tracing
* Plug-in system/replaceable parts
* Offer a scripting language and/or support for popular ones
* Tools to prototype quickly if necessary
* Create one or more games that is understandable to demonstrate features, but is still comprehensible
* Support modern asset formats
* Provide decent, predictable, hardware support
* Ensure a stable experience
I'll let the reader interpret which of those CryEngine does wrong.
Some versions of CryEngine actually do some of these things well, but the problem is that relative to other options like Unreal, everyone I know has found it hard to justify buying or using CryEngine going forward. CryEngine in terms of raw features often looks attractive and awesome. Most people I've known including myself have had issues arise once you try to build something real with it. Quite often things just don't work how they should or are incredibly quirky. There's always tons of things promised that will be "fixed" or "redone" and never get done in a reasonable amount of time.
Just look at the Star Citizen situation. Hiring former CryEngine devs really helped the project they say, and that's not just because those people are awesome developers, it is because they understand the crazy quirks that most people who didn't work with that code every day don't and in some cases never will.
The game engine market isn't an easy one, but frankly they brought this on themselves.
Their product sure is impressive and easy to set up and from what I've seen it is great for getting started and making smaller indie games.
However, it doesn't seem to have sufficient support for the kind of large collaborations and processes that you need when making a AAA game. I have read that they've done improvements on some of these things (making their data play nice with revision control systems, for instance). But I'm still not sure they are there yet.
If I were running one of the machine learning divisions in MS, Google et. al. I would be combing through linked-in and firing up the headhunters right about now.
The alternative is, of course, company acquisition. You're not really buying the IP in this case (although its a nice side bonus), you're 'buying' the dev talent in one big company-sized package.
If there's money in the bank and it doesn't go to paying the employees or executing a maneuver to get the employees paid, its theft plain and simple.
At that point leadership is deciding not to pay all that it can. If there's 0 in the bank, it's just bad business, but they can't do anything else, other than at least be forthright, which it seems like they refuse to be.
Crytek is also German, right? So I have no idea how that works there.
When the person starting bankruptcy proceedings is an employee with outstanding salary payments, said person can start proceedings with no money down, and the state covers all costs of the proceedings that can't be recovered from the company.
On top of that, as long as your demand is timely, your salary up to a certain limit can be recovered from a government insurance system if the company is truly insolvent and the money can't be recovered from the estate.
This strongly incentivises employees to not put up with any nonsense over unpaid salaries, as there are few costs involved, and while it will take some time to get your salary paid, you will get it eventually (and Norwegian unemployment benefits are substantial enough that getting them is certainly far better than waiting for an insolvent employer to drip-feed you payment).
And as a result it strongly incentivises employers to prioritise salary payments or otherwise negotiate a suitable agreement with staff rather than just stringing people along, and quickly weed out insolvent companies that often would otherwise be able to drag things out by sweet-talking creditors - it's harder to string staff along when they can demand you bankrupt if you don't treat them properly.
Yes, the norwegian system is superior.
PS: The german legal system is full of those laws that cause extensive legal-battles, shipping the money of the cause to the laws soldiers of fortune. To navigate around these black holes of law is quite a art.
Take the outrageous concept of the "Erbengemeinschaft" as example. If a companys owner does not have a last will, the company ownership gets by default split up on all descendants and their descendants, making it basically impossible to continue such a company- as this creates a hostage situation with anyone, who is unwilling to get paid out.
Or this one, where pg suggests that people don't downvoting a grey post (I think people do downvote grey posts now, more than they used to.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683
this thread also has some comments about voting (and a bunch of other stuff, including ahem politics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696)
Rather than say "well, I just failed to pay money I don't have" you can just say "oh no, it's cool, I'm just downloading it"
If you believed everything you read here the world would be a very alien place.
You're the one jumping to conclusions. All I said is that they got a bunch of free labour, which is true regardless of whether they knowingly did so or not.
The issue at hand is making a contract for something/labor, using it up, and not paying. It's a totally different topic.
Specifically for wages and insurance dues there's this law: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st....
Summary: Up to 5 years in prison.
But even that's called "criminal bankrupty", and not "credit theft" or something. Possibly because you can't steal credit - it's either given, or it's not given.
In the same way, work is either performed, or it's not performed. It's not somehow stealthily extracted from you while you're not looking.
But putting aside the legalism, it's just plain wrong.
People just want to rationalize using the word to mean something different from what it actually means, for dramatic effect.
Your correction didn't apply, btw.
Btw, where's your evidence that 'everyone' on HN knows the difference? We are speaking literally here of course, where 'everyone' means literally every single individual who uses this site. Surely you're not just using hyperbole for 'dramatic effect', as you put it?
At any rate it's ok. I think I understood your non-literal meaning (i.e. the vast majority). But good on you for clearing up that whole 'theft' issue; people were getting very confused there...
- I said credit is given
- You said credit is given <and stuff>.
It really is safe to assume that we all have a shared understanding of what "theft" means in the real world.
It's a simple word, and a simple concept that generally applies to physical property that is taken from its rightful owner, without the owner noticing, or at least without coercion being employed in acquiring it.
If taking someone's property involves coercion, then we're talking about robbery, not theft. We all share this understanding too.
Some people want to use the word for dramatic effect when virtue-signalling online, but that doesn't change the shared understanding.
- Physical property
- Taken from the rightful owner
- Taken without the owner noticing / no coercion
So let's say I take your ATM card without you noticing. That's theft right? What if I then go to an ATM and drain your bank account? Given that money was never in your possession (it was just a number in an electronic ledger somewhere, one keeping track of all the loans made and credits owed by the bank [your deposit is credit to the bank, for instance]), then I'm not committing theft, right?
Boy, this literal language stuff sure is tough! But I'd appreciate your clarification, as it seems so very important we only ever use language in a completely literal manner.
It's interesting you bring up 'shared understanding'; you beat me to it. I doubt very much that anyone, except maybe your literal self, thinks employers are paying their workers and then physically stealing the money back when people use the phrase 'wage theft'. In other words, there's a 'shared understanding' of the non-literal meaning of that phrase.
I mean, when someone calls someone else an 'oxygen thief' I don't think anyone else (again, except for maybe you) actually believes someone is running around stealthily taking oxygen molecules that don't belong to them. It's just a funny insult that literally everyone (-1) mutually understands in a non-literal way.
And sorry, I have no idea what 'virtue signalling' is. Is it some kind of secret hand signal?
In most cases, salaries are paid for work already performed. So, for at least the first cycle of a missed payroll, the non-paid work was stealthily extracted from you.
And, typically, that's when the company starts telling stories about technical payroll glitches, and so on. Arguably more stealth.
Apples and oranges. Shoplifting is a particular kind of theft - not paying someone's salary is not.
A shoplifter takes something from a shop. An employer that doesn't pay someone's salary does not take something from the employee - he refrains from giving.
Besides, work is not physical property. Most people on HN would object to pirating movies being called "theft" of intellectual property, but somehow it's alright to use the word when talking about not being paid one's salary.
In Australia we have the same thing in our Corporations Act: trading while insolvent. Penalties are levied against company directors: $200,000 civil penalty, 5 years imprisonment, and directors being made personally liable for compensating creditors (i.e. 'piercing the corporate veil').
If your business fails, that's unfortunate and you have my sympathy. But it does not give you the right to economically damage the businesses and people around you on your way down.
The money workers are not paid are wages lost due to theft of their work.
I've had my car broken into twice for, well, nothing. I don't remember exactly how much it was to repair, but at most $200.
On the other hand, I've had a company steal around $15,000 from me. What's worse, some idiotic junkie, or some corrupt manager or investor who's buying an Audi on my and my coworkers' dime? If we're talking who deserves to hang, I know who certainly ranks higher on my own list.
But as cperciva pointed out, the Crytek case doesn't sound like a case of a "corrupt manager or investor who's buying an Audi on [their employees'] dime". It's a company with a history of both successes and difficulties, struggling to survive in a notoriously risky industry, and facing serious cash-flow problems.
Of course we don't know the details of what's happening at executive level, and we can safely assume there's been some poor management and poor communication to staff.
But we can also assume that the management is sincerely doing everything they can to keep the company afloat, to get their staff paid and to keep them employed well into the future, which is what the staff want too, given that the alternative is to shut down the company immediately and for everyone to be made unemployed.
Conflating this situation with wage theft is quite unfair, at least in the absence of further evidence.
Morality is a spectrum, and you can only make a judgement call on it when all the details are known, which right now they aren't.
Robbery? Now that's a different thing. But theft? Close enough.
If the company let them know, shared the plan to make them whole and asked them to stick around then it's not wage theft, if they lied or hid the situation then it is.
Sounds like the latter to me but obviously don't know the details personally.
That's the most naive thing I've read all week.
If managers/owners want to prove sincerity (and some do), they pay for their wage bill out of pocket or borrow against the value of personal assets to do so. That's how you prove that you believe in what you're doing.
Until that point, assuming sincerity is the best way to get completely screwed.
For all we know they're doing or trying to do all those things. I'm not saying they are. I'm just pointing out the fact that we don't know all the details.
Staff are perfectly entitled to leave the company and take legal action to recover what they're owed.
Equally, the management is entitled to the presumption of innocence regarding criminal or immoral conduct, particularly when all we have to go on right now is a few anecdotal reports.
Then, would you sue the company to get your money back? Exactly how, if you don't have any money.
I get the idea of 'if you leave maybe you never get paid', but if you stay you've obviously got no guarantee of getting paid either, and you'll at least be doing something that hopefully does pay while fighting for what's owed.
Their situation can be unique to them, I can't know the motivations of developers I don't know.
- programming has become much more efficient due to better tools (such as engines) and the ability to waste a few clock cycles here and there.
- The market for games has expanded dramatically since the 90ies. There are 10x as many people with the hardware and money to buy your game (not even counting mobile).
- Piracy today is significantly lower than it was in the 90ies, mostly due to constant network connectivity.
Here's a nice chart, showing revenue quadrupled since 2000: http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
This extends to startups that sign support contracts for their products X years in the future and go belly up, leaving customers with dead weight equipment. A colleague, frustrated at such an event, said he would seek legal reparations to which he heard back "who are you going to sue? The company doesn't exist anymore" and that was it.
What's in place to go after irresponsible individuals in those situations?
EDIT: I understand there are risks in every business negotiation. Would this be an example of customer naivety (in not performing due diligence before acquiring products/service from companies if they expect long-term support?) Is the customer to blame for not knowing how to properly play this game?
The situation I described happened with a US startup. I'd be curious what we should have done in that situation.
This seems to be the result of the founders disregard for anything but their own fame and glory. The lesson should probably be that some humility, pragmatism is definetly needed.
I wonder what costed them the most resources VR or Free-to-play games.
There's not a massive user base but it's chicken and egg and repurposing existing content could be a great boost for the sector.
They were hiring until the bitter end. The last hire never got paid by the company at all.
I got hired by a company that wasnt paying it's wages. Nobody told me about it but in hindsight, it was probably clear given the churn of the employees. I started bankruptcy proceedings when they failed to pay me and got paid because of that, whilst others who didn't quite share my immediacy never got paid.
I left for another company that had form for not paying it's bills and again it still had workers, both employees and contractors that didn't really make me aware until I was already owed quite a bit. I tried the same tactic when they failed to pay me, but they disputed my work (which thus requires court proceedings). Unfortunately the intermediary I was using winded up and I lost any ability to follow up the case and thus this company is no doubt still hiring consultants in and not paying them.
Both companies are still around in one form or another despite having IP that they've essentially stole. On the bright side I learnt a lot about business and binned off the intermediaries.
http://www.crytek.com/career/offers/overview/frankfurt/progr...