Crytek Sells Homefront to Deep Silver

Maybe Crytek can now pay it's employees. :(

The Homefront premise is terrific, execution is really missing. Believe it or not, I actually think that its in better hands with Deep Silver than its previous 2 owners.

I'm guessing that they didn't have to buy the IP for very much. Crytek bought the Homefront IP for a relatively small sum during the liquidation of THQ's assets. Deep Silver probably didn't pay Crytek that much more to acquire it for themselves.

If I remember correctly, wasn't Crytek going into free-to-play? Actually, what the hell happened to Warface?

They bring on the Timesplitters gang, the Homefront IP, and then this news springs up?

I guess both of those really ARE cursed. That sucks!

deep silver has deep pockets...

@monkeyking1969:

I've never heard of this show, but as an America, let me guess what I just saw in German: Was it a nagging exhausted wife with her big, dumb, dopey, baffoon of a husband? (Of course it was, because that's every sit-com of the last thirty years).

I can't wait for Homefront to come out, just so I can buy it and play it and marvel at the hilarious failure it is sure to be. Coming from a fairly shitty game that felt old when it launched and then booted around three or more different publishers/developers -- it has "really pretty Duke Nukem Forever" written all over it.

I would be glad to be wrong. I like the very raw concept of the original Homefront game. I would like nothing more than for it to be a tremendous game and a real joy to play.

In this particular case, the reference is being made since Homefront was not very good and there is little to find incredibly promising in a sequel. So, why is a natural question at that point.

Whether or not the reference itself is problematic is a different matter.

I hope Crytek can recover. Even their bad games are pretty good. I like pretty much everything they've put out.

I do sincerely hope that the technology side of Crytek survives long term. The market needs a little more variety in it's engines, otherwise we'll just end up in a situation where almost every game looks or plays similarly like the last go round with UE3.

i proberly in the minority but i'm happy that Homefront hopefully has found a new home.

THANK GOD

HOMEFRONT IS SAVED

@gaff: Or just if it even needs to exist. The market is still flooded with shooters from sci-fi to brodude, 1st to 3rd person. A desperate sequel to a half-assed game isn't going to change the world.

But the name THQ was synonymous with Garbage Products for so long that I think Nordic would be better served to just build their own reputation. Putting out Darksiders 3 would be a nice start for that.

Nothing new for Crytek, unfortunately. They did this with FarCry, as well.

From their point of view, they can always develop a new IP, and maybe sell it down the line. Not that I have confidence in this happening --- it's definitely a long shot from my perspective --- but I can understand why they chose this move.

Homefront was short, story had flaws and werent really any good. And for that, they took full price.

I actually enjoyed the multiplayer in the first Homefront quite a bit, but obviously I'm the minority on that one. I just hope the developers are doing alright: This sounds like a mess in just about every way

I know it is beaten to death by now, but Homefront seems to be surviving better than it's performance warrants so far, and Crytek is the one sinking. Why, hello there THQ, I'm coming down fast but don't let me break you...something like that.

Sure agree with that poster about Space Marine, I would have loved a sequel to that one. The glow from that one reminded me of the fate of Freedom Fighters.

Guess we'll still be getting this game after all...

Just when that game started to look really cool...

Maybe Crytek got butt-raped by external politics. Countries are now placing trade sanctions on Russia, and I think Crytek's F2P title Warface was popular in that market.

@somedelicook: A new Half-Life being the next DNF would require it to exist in the first place.

I don't wonder if it's cursed but I do wonder if the IP is worth it.

Not really, this game has only switched developers (and even then it was a different team within the company) not delayed endlessly or media silent.

A new Half-Life is the next DNF

Wow... This game is turning into another DNF.

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.

Crytek is about to cry...

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

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.

don't Cry for me tek.

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 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!

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

Goodbyetek.

@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.

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. "

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

@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.

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

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.