Crytek Sells Homefront to Deep Silver

Homefront is switching hands yet again. First, it was from THQ to Crytek. Now, publisher Deep Silver has wholly acquired the franchise, including all creative assets for Homefront: The Revolution from Crytek. Development on the game is being moved to a new studio, Deep Silver Dambuster Studios.

The news comes in the wake of Crytek struggling to pay employees and finance projects. We haven't talked about Crytek's issues much on Giant Bomb, but the studio's deep troubles have been well documented by Jason Schreier at Kotaku.

Homefront: Revolution had been under the care of Crytek UK. It's unclear if the original development staff will relocate to Deep Silver Dambuster Studios, or if the game will suffer any delays.

You sometimes have to wonder if the Homefront IP is actually cursed.

What the heck happened to Crytek? It seems like they're just falling apart at the seams.

Huh! Weird! Was not expecting that. Hopefully this game doesn't end up being terrible as a result of all this. Even though I didn't have super high expectations, some of it sounded conceptually interesting.

So that's what Crytek meant when they came out and said they'd secured new capital. "We've got a bit more money but now we're lost the IP we just bought and the development contract." Not good for the long term and basically screws all the Crytek UK staff.

Now I'm really interested as to what kind of game this will turn out to be. With exchanging this many hands, it could hopefully breath new creative life into the product. Or turn it into an even greater train wreck.

Eurogamer is reporting that Crytek UK is, in fact, being renamed as Dambuster Studios.

Crysis was never a big hit, all their F2P stuff pretty much tanked or didn't catch on and the CryEngine is also not a big success story. Also they employ like 400 people I think.

Man, I have to guess troubles probably started around the time they developed Ryse (a loooong time ago) and than this, plus a whole lot of other stuff that we aren't even privy to. :(

I thought Homefront had lots of potential, and was disappointed when Crytek picked it up. They seem to acquire great IP like Homefront and Timesplitters, then proceed to pump out soulless numbered Crysis games.

Well deep silver were co publishing it with Crytek so it all makes sense that they would take full control when Crytek could no longer do that, I don't see anything changing that much to be honest.

Did anyone hear about nordic games wanting to purchase the THQ name because "nordic games" wasn't widely known? Wouldn't it be hilarious if in 6 months we read the headline "Deep Silver sells Homefront to... THQ"

Vinny's Gamefly queue for the sequel will have to wait!

what i'm really curious about is how deep silver got all huge all of a sudden and can afford all these IPs.

@hailinel said:

If I had to guess it was that whole "let's get really get into the engine side of things". Super expensive.

Not to sounds like an ass but I feel this news has created far more talk about Homefront than we probably would have had otherwise.

They bought THQs biggest franchises for super cheap and made a ton of money off them, that's it.

RIP Deep Silver. You gave us some good games in your day.

Seems like a crazy idea, but how about just nobody makes a new Homefront? Where is that Bombcast clip where Jeff is a video game CEO just asking "why" about Prey 2?

Crytek with money! it's employees will be able to pay rent this month after all.

Is the CryEngine particularly widely licensed? It seems like the only times I see it mentioned as being used are in CryTek's showpieces for it, but I can't tell if that's just because the games that use it under license are a lot less vocal about it

Don't forget about crytek Austin aka vigil. They got the official shaft as well even though they've been getting shafted for a while as well. They deserve better than just being reduced to a "support team" which is bull.

It seems like Crytek got very bloated and is now deflating again at a rapid pace. They might survive this but I'm curious to see what shape it will be in after this is over.

Cash in hand is worth more than a potential money making franchise for Crytek I guess.

They must be really struggling to start selling IP. Then again it was barely their IP so maybe this is just a measure to ensure they have the cash to keep going.

No, they made a lot of money from Dead Island which sold well and wasn't very expensive to make. That conviced parent company Koch Media to invest more in AAA games.

I doubt they've made that much money with Saints Row 4 or Metro Last Light, but maybe I'm wrong.

Should I no longer consider Crytek UK to be the Free Radical guys? Does that exist anymore? Just make more TimeSplitters.

Vigil (Crytek Austin) and Free Radical (Crytek UK) reportedly closed. Developing?

So, is Deep Silver the new THQ?

I wonder how Crytek Sofia (ex. Black Sea Studios) is faring. I haven't heard any announced projects from them since they got acquired by Crytek, and their older game Worldshift passed through Greenlight but was quietly removed from there without getting a Steam release earlier this year.

It seems fairly popular among indie games. Not quite as large as UDK, but certainly up there. Probably comparable to Source? If I recall correctly Star Citizen is using CryEngine.

At least we now know how Crytek scraped together enough cash to pay its employees.

@fisk0: thanks, just trying to get a sense of where the focus is - engine licensing or making games. I assume it has to be the licensing, but then they bought IPs and they've been cranking out new ones at a greater than usual pace recently. Seems like an awful lot of inorganic growth bloated them out quite a bit.

@ghostnpc: it's being changed into a ccg/ moba

Every gambler knows
That the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' what to throw away
And knowin' what to keep
'Cause every game's a winner
And every game's a loser
And the best that you can hope for
Is to...sell it to idiots at Koch Media. "

@monkeyking1969:

They are freerolling here thanks to the easy money they made from buying Saints Row 4 for pennies on the dollar when it was almost completely finished. Since they also got the entire franchise in the deal, there is little reason to think SR5 is going to poorly as well.

While today's purchase is far from the sure-thing Saint's Row was, if they feel the game has potential, then they could have another profitable franchise on their hands for cheap once more.

Goodbyetek.

I hope Crytek survives.

My guess is Deep Silver got Homefront for a song. They've been pretty smart about this kind of thing in recent years.

Sad to see Crytek struggling. I liked the first Crysis, but the last two were far too console oriented. They lost the open feeling of Crysis, which was that game's main saving grace other than the awesome visuals. After playing the original Crysis, I was ready for an open world follow up, but it never came. I hope they can figure things out. Never good to see a studio go under.

Deep Silver made good choices buying Saints Row/Metro for cheap, but Homefront? Crap franchise, and I doubt Revolution is nearly finished. Crap investment imo.

Also Crytek messed up big with Ryse.

@fisk0:

State of Decay also uses it to great advantage and I love that game in spite of the floaty feel the car driving in that engine has.

My impressions of Cryteks history follow.

Crytek and other european studios like Dice repeated the success of US PC game studios like Epic and id that built their own engines for FPS games. They followed the same progression that Epic did to consoles but too late. Epic released Gears of War at the right time in 2006 whereas Crytek, Dice and id released Crysis 2, Battlefield 3 and Rage in 2011. It probably doesn't help that Crytek's initial target audience was the european market where a large share are PC gamers who were alienated by the new direction.

I have this strange feeling that the ambitions of CEO Mr. Yerli are driving the company into the ground from buying up studios rather than nurturing creative integrity. I guess they have at least tried something new compared to id (bought by Zenimax) and Dice (slaves of EA).

As someone who enjoyed many hours of my late teenage years toying around in their first engine map editor (supplied with Far Cry) much like people screw around in Minecraft today, it makes me sad to see them struggle.

Poor free radical cant catch a break,

cant say I care about crytek and its future, they haven't made a good game since crisis 1 and they keep hiring extremely talented people only to reassign them to super generic projects.

Prey 2 was an incredibly promising game from what little we knew of it... I never understand why people bring that reference up. People were stoked for that game. If someone can take the concepts that worked in Homefront and fix the rest it could be a cool game.

Also, they are pretty much becoming the new THQ. They don't need everything to be huge, they just need to have some good middling successes to flesh out their catalog.

They really need to figure out what they are. They have made one of the best engines out there, but they keep trying to break out from making the occasional generational game that shows off their engine, instead of just developing new technologies.

I'd love to see Crytek get into the coveted "US Army Simulator" category. The only category that is pretty much 100% about the technology.

Don't chide me....for you know not what evil lurks beneath.

To date, Koch Media, has sold 1 million copies of the successful series "The King of Queens" on DVD and Blu-ray in the German-speaking territories....

That's right, they spread "The King of Queens" to German-speaking peoples [shiver]... what monsters.

Achtung! Herr Heffernan!

I don't want to live in a world where people break their backs making Homefront 2; while Vanquish, Binary Domain, Shadow Complex, Jade Empire, Freedom Fighters and Warhammer 40k: Space Marine will never get one measly sequel.

don't Cry for me tek.

I remember when Crytek was a successful PC developer with an excellent reputation for making games that were technical marvels and that also featured impressive emergent gameplay. But that wasn't good enough for them, so they decided to make mediocre generic console games instead. Chalk up another studio that abandoned the PC for "more money" only to not actually make more money.

It sucks. I hope Crytek comes out of all this...

Crytek is about to cry...

Just make a god damn fucking Timesplitters game. Seriously. Not wanting to because they don't know if theres a market for Timesplitters and then immediately having Free Radical work on a Homefront game is one of the most ironic things ever. And stupidest. Homefront Revolution will end up being a cool game, but it won't hold a candle to a Timesplitters game.

Or hell, release Timesplitters HD with content from 2 and Future Perfect to 'test the waters' as it were. That fan project doesn't count either, as much as I hope that ends up being good.