Developer Crytek has today announced that the long-awaited Crysis 4 has been put “on hold” as it lays off roughly 60 staff members. Crysis 4 was announced back in January of 2022, almost a decade after Crysis 3 was released.
The announcement was made via the company’s X page where it claimed that Crytek was not immune to “complex, unfavourable market dynamics.”
“It pains us greatly to share today that we must lay off an estimated 15% of our around 400 employees,” says the post. “The layoffs affect development teams and shared services. This has not been an easy decision to make, as we deeply appreciate the hard work of our talented teams.”
— Crytek (@Crytek) February 12, 2025
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I was actually quite shocked to learn that Crytek was employing so many people.
According to Crytek, they have been working on “trying to shift developers over to Hunt: Showdown 1896.”
“While Hunt: Showdown 1896 is still growing, Crytek cannot continue as before and remain financially sustainable,” continues the statement. “Even after ongoing efforts to reduce costs and cut operating expenses, we have determined that lays are inevitable to move forward.”
Crytek are promising to aid affected employees with severance packages and career assistance services.
Crytek seems to be focusing heavily on Hunt: Showdown 1896 as it appears to be the only thing currently supporting the entire studio and its now 340 employees. The company states that it still “firmly believes in the future of Crytek” and that “With Hunt: Showdown 1896, we have a very strong gaming service.” They say they intend on expanding the game further with more content.
To put the game into more context, Hunt: Showdown 1896 has benefited from a small resurgence since December of 2024 when Post Malone’s Murder Circus was added. Since then the game has consistently been bringing in 20,000 concurrent players on Steam every day.
While those numbers are good, I do find it hard to believe it’s enough to continue supporting Crytek’s employee count. Arrowhead Game Studios, who built and run Helldivers 2, for example, has around 100+ employees and much higher player counts. Having said that, Helldivers 2 is something of an unusual case.
To Crytek’s credit, Hunt: Showdown 1896 has continued on a slow, steady upward trajectory since releasing in 2019 where it typically only saw player counts in the low thousands. Looking at the charts, it appears to have hit its stride in 2021, and even managed to hit 60,000+ concurrent players in August of 2024. Since 2021 though, the overall growth has remained roughly static. If that’s the case, will the game ever grow enough to let Crytek do anything else, or will they now be stuck working on Hunt: Showdown for the foreseeable future, unable to grow enough to give them space to work on other projects?
If there’s any good news it’s that Crysis 4 has not be cancelled. The wording “on hold’ provides at least some small hope that the game might still be revived and come to market.
