I wonder how long till somebody either buys them out, or they die out. It is a shock to me and a shame. I've always appreciated game engines as a programmer knowing full well the amount of work regular software takes, their engine still astounds me. I hope the best happens, it would be a huge shame to see those developers be lost. There has to be a company out there that would benefit from such engineers. Maybe Valve, Microsoft, Apple? Google even? I say big players because it would put them in a competitive area of the gaming industry. Just thinking aloud. I hope for the best for those employees, and I hope this is a lesson to us all that money should be managed wisely, regardless of if you're running a company or your own personal finances.
I wouldn't say that. nearly 70%-90% of the market barly need that much knowledge to the hardware than a game engineer needs.
The knowledge they need are extremly different from that of a game engine engineer.
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).
Some should be able to just move sideways into ML. Fundamentally, they know how to squeeze great performance out of a GPU. That's not something many developers know how to do.
Probably only ~100 of those jobs across Europe at the moment, though.
Aerospace is not performance critical, at least not the overall industry. There are parts that are important, but a lot of them are not.
I watched a talk where a company used clojure for diagnostics (board metrics and faults (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUC7noGU1mQ) for maintanenance).
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.
While yes it takes a lot of time to make a game the indie scene isn't interested simply because of unity's dominance.
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...
I believe the game Streamline, released November 18th, is built with Lumberyard and makes use of its Twitch integration. This game's studio had support from Amazon.
Games are a huge market but it's also extremely competitive and difficult to build a lasting advantage over your competitors. It's all hits-driven, so in many respects competing is closer to running a Hollywood studio than a tech-driven or even sales-driven company.
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.
Cool, thanks for the citation. Didn't know that. I wonder why Microsoft isn't trying harder to make Xbox a home automation hub/Alexa competitor, or push it as a VR platform.
Xbox was launched in an era when there was real fear that Sony's then upcoming PlayStation would "win the living room" and home purchases of Windows PC's would cease. No one thinks of the PlayStation as a general purpose conpetitor to the PC in the home today, so now the Xbox is just an incredibly low margins product (for Microsoft). Microsoft would much rather sell you a much more profitable PC as your VR hub/Alexa competitor.
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.
Their engine is still king. Unity is not even in the same league or market segment. Unreal is close, but I think they're still behind, at least graphically.
Former game engine dev and for a long while, proprietary engine programmer here....
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.
One thing many have mentioned is the talent pool to be acquired from acquisition is worthwhile. However, another factor which the article hints at is the fact Crytrek was focusing on VR. Since they have a capable engine and engineers, if the right company got a hand of them like I said even Microsoft could reuse the talent pool to focus on VR, and still produce some amazing games for Windows / X-Box. There's many possibilities but whoever buys them out needs to do it before there's not much left to salvage. Of course anything could happen.
I would like to say that I don't see Unity as being the same kind of serious option as Unreal or the Cryengine, yet.
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.
The specific skill set crytek game engine devs have is increasingly in demand, which will continue to grow. Specifically, the ability to write highly optimised code (mostly C++) to parallel process large amounts of data on GPUs.
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.
Why doesn't it have the funds, and is it just making sure to pay other people/vendors first?
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.
IANAL, and from what I understand the laws about pay schedule vary by state, so I'm not going to make some claim I can't substantiate. But my guess is if you're 5 weeks late paying your employees you're most likely committing wage theft (probably also not paying payroll taxes on time). You have to liquidate assets, conduct layoffs, or close the business from what I understand.
Crytek is also German, right? So I have no idea how that works there.
I like the Norwegian approach: If you are not paid on time, you can sent a letter by recorded delivery, demanding payment. If you have not been paid within 4 weeks, you can have your employer served with a bankruptcy notice with two weeks warning. If they have not paid within that time, you can start bankruptcy proceedings, which will effectively put an administrator in charge.
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.
In germany it's different, you need to send a adhortatory letter and set a deadline, you can also require additional intereset and damages after 2-3 month you can actually stop working but still getting paid ("right of retention"). you can also go to court or resign without further notice and demand a compensation.
Also if the employer is actually in a bankruptcy prceeding you can get social money up to a certain degree.
Also the invsolvency-administrators can be thief's.
As in Lawyer-chambers, that win no matter how hard they run the company into the ground, by simply having it in as many legal battles as possible and billing it by the hour for those very legal battles they caused- bills which override the claims to the bankruptcy assets of all other Creditors.
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.
See https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st.... Up to five years in jail if you fail to pay wages. This is in addition to the more generic criminal bankruptcy that could apply here – usually you're required to notify the courts if you're out of money.
Is he? So if I'm poor, can I go to a store, take a copy of a Crytek game, and claim "well, I just failed to pay money I don't have" and not be accused of stealing?
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
If it comes to pass that Crytek cannot, and knowingly could not, pay them then that's when to bandwagon. Not before it's known. That's how it plays out on HN. Guilty before proven innocent.
If you believed everything you read here the world would be a very alien place.
cperciva wrote "a company failing to pay money it doesn't have is not the same thing as stealing", and you wrote he was factually correct. How do you know if he's factually correct, if, as you admit, it's still not known if they knowingly stiffed the workers?
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.
Torrenting is relevant if you copy someone's labor. Or otherwise receive value from their preexisting actions without them expending additional effort.
The issue at hand is making a contract for something/labor, using it up, and not paying. It's a totally different topic.
He's incorrect. If you willingly take on debt even though you know you will not be able to pay it you're committing criminal bankruptcy (in Germany, where Crytek is based). Usually you have to notify the courts if you've been unable to pay for two weeks.
> If you willingly take on debt even though you know you will not be able to pay it you're committing criminal bankruptcy
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.
Correction: it's money given under the condition it will be paid back at some point in future. Someone who acquires credit, 'trade-credit' (i.e. deferred invoice payment) or whatever you call the employee/employer equivalent in the full knowledge that they will not be able to pay it back is basically committing fraud. As in, 'obtaining a financial benefit by means of deception'.
But putting aside the legalism, it's just plain wrong.
Ok I concede the point. The literal definition of 'theft' is not the same as 'fraud'.
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...
What I meant about your correction was that you just tacked on a qualifier after "given".
- I said credit is given
- You said credit is given <and stuff>.
Therefore, no correction.
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.
Is it? Your definition of theft is something taken that is:
- 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?
>It's not somehow stealthily extracted from you while you're not looking
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.
"I was going to pay later!" is not a defense for shoplifting, nor is it a defense for wage theft. Get credit from a bank or a credit card; they're capable of busting your ass for lying about when you'll pay. Employees, especially those who have had their wages stolen, are not in that position.
> "I was going to pay later!" is not a defense for shoplifting, nor is it a defense for wage theft.
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.
Sophistry. Its the same as theft, except its my time that's being taken without compensation. Make up another word for that, that means the same thing as theft if you like.
^^ I'm glad someone here gets it. And these kinds of laws are not at all unusual.
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.
How is prosecuting time theft socialist? If you do work, you should be paid plain and simple, hence why it is a felony in most countries to alter timesheets or not pay your employees.
>the employer stole some work from you when you weren't looking?
Yeah, pretty much. They took work from you while you were (justifiably) assuming they were going to pay you. But you weren't looking at their true intentions or financial capability.
I've been mugged for $80 cash and my phone before. Call it $500.
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.
Undoubtedly it's awful to be denied payment for work you've done in good faith, and the more so the lower your income and safety net. It's happened to me several times in my career, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
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.
I don't think there's anything ethical about stringing your employees along for 3 months without pay, regardless of how successful you may have been in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140938
Previously it was theft. I'd agree that it is theft unless the employees were informed about the situation a la "We cannot pay wages for a while, would you volunteer to still come in?".
Robbery? Now that's a different thing. But theft? Close enough.
The financial management of crytek likely knew they couldn't meet their responsibilities to their employees.
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.
>But we can also assume that the management is sincerely doing everything they can to keep the company afloat
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.
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.
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.
What??? Employees are not a bank for a company to get a line of credit from, if a business does not pay wages that is theft, whether you are in the US, Germany, etc and you will be put in prison for doing so.
Fucking with people's lives by not paying them cause your company is insolvent is morally unjustifiable, either you pay them for work done or tell them to not do said work.
Well if you signed a contract, that's legally binding... that's why contracts exist in the first place. Then, besides contracts there are labor regulations. If you don't respect the terms of contract and labor regulations you are not abiding the law. And not abiding the law on purpose (as Crytek has consistently demonstrated over the years) is a very unethical business practice.
Then, would you sue the company to get your money back? Exactly how, if you don't have any money.
Working without pay has increasingly been called "wage theft" in casual parlance, but the applicable statute depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, failing to pay a worker for completed work is a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (and subsequent statute) if you fail to meet minimum wage levels, and it also probably runs afoul of state and local laws in various jurisdictions. As US labor laws are significantly weaker than their EU counterparts, it is primarily pursued a civil matter since it's obviously breach of contract -- if pursued at all. EU law protects employees from losing their wage claims in the event of employer insolvency. For most workers, the cost of seeking redress is not something they can afford to do, although local resources to file complaints may be available in some jurisdictions (such as SF). A common tactic of employer wage theft is misclassification of workers as independent contractors, a practice that is falling under increasing scrutiny from regulators.
You're right. It's more like fraud. Though you could argue (as others have) that the theft is not of money but rather of work -- your time an employee has a dollar value and thus can be stolen through outright fraud.
I couldn't imagine sticking around for this long if the problems have been going on since June. I would've been looking for a new job the second my first check was late and would've executed a move immediately after the second was late as well.
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.
It is anecdotal evidence, but I had two friends at two separate companies that missed to pay salaries. The two people individually found comfort in the environment, and at first neither was not seeking a move. The motivation was led by the persons' belief that the situation will go back to normal, not by a lack of qualifications or demand thereof. Both people were/are highly qualified and had skills in demand.
Their situation can be unique to them, I can't know the motivations of developers I don't know.
also a month's pay is a lot of money, and you know if you leave you will never see it. the hope is by staying you will eventually get your back pay too
I got into programming and software development due to my love of games. I've created independent games and worked at major game studios. If this is article is accurate then unfortunately I'm not surprised. There are major business model related issues across the industry. Top talent getting low pay and doing it just because of "passion" which can only last so long (for an individual) but the then new blood arrives for the cycle to continue. Games and game engines are hard to create and require excellence across multiple disciplines and customers do not value games enough to pay what they are used to already. Prices are similar to what they were for triple-a titles as back in the 90s when games were simpler. Add HD/4K graphics and the latest networking, audio, other modern jazz and all the staff required and what they're charging for a game is a joke.
- 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.
I'm taking about console/tripe a games, if that chart is right then it shows the revenue for those has not quadrupled and even if it did it says nothing about profitability.
You're forgetting that AAA game creation today requires way more art assets than it ever did. I'm no insider to the industry, but it's obvious that there's far less reuse of assets, and assets are also far more detailed.
That chart says that "PC games" amount for maybe $2-4bn in revenue in 2014 compared to console games' $20bn - that order-of-magnitude difference doesn't sit well with me at all. Where's the source data for this chart? I find it hard to believe that mobile games generate 5x more revenue than PC games.
It's sad, but it shouldn't be surprising. Game companies are constantly trying to hit deadlines and push out new products; often stressing out developers, artists and the rest of their production staff. From what I hear, it seems as bad as the movie industry. Some companies get one windfall, think they have room to relax and then run out of money (often spending too much on fancy offices or stupid crap in the process).
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.
I also got into programming because of games and after doing some freelance work for a game studio (as a summer job two summers in a row during my university studies) and seeing all the bad stuff people talk about first hand I was hesitant to go into that industry after graduating.
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.
When I was in high school I wanted to be a game developer. I loved playing video games at the time ( late 90's), why not get paid to make them as well! Then I read an article in Next Generation that discussed the games industry and then that dream vanished. After reading about crazy deadlines where husbands didn't come home for weeks and couples having conjugal visits in the office I decided that wasn't for me. Sounds like a lot hasn't changed in the past 20 years.
"Rather than building on stronger IP like Crysis, Timesplitters or Ryse, Crytek has tried its luck with VR and free to play projects, which aren’t paying the bills."
I wonder what costed them the most resources VR or Free-to-play games.
I really don't understand why studios aren't doing VR revamps of existing succesful games. The Doom 3 mod shows how successful this can be. It's one of the best experiences out there and it's a free mod made possible by the fact the source for Doom 3 was released by ID. Yeah - the textures could do with being a bit higher res and not everyone can stomach the locomotion - but come on - throw stuff out there and see what happens
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.
I think the VR games could well have been "paying the bills". They're both exclusives and likely wouldn't have happened without Oculus and Sony paying for them.
> 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.
My understanding is that a company which fails to pay the wages is automatically liqudated (after someone triggers the official process and they still fail to pay). For employees it is actually problematic to continue working if they don't get paid in full.
I've personally been through this twice as an employee.
"Everything's fine." "Everything's fine." "Everything's fine." "We're shutting down operations today and locking the doors, clean out your desk and leave the property."
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.
Having friends there here in Frankfurt, this makes me deeply and profoundly sad, and angry.
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 just hope the IP stays in Germany. Really sad to see that one of our internationally better-known game forges seems to die. Like so many good studios before them.
What bothers me the most is that, in my limited view, these companies can do shady stuff like that, close down and it's end of story. What's in place to punish the owners so they have less incentive to try this again?
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?
No, they cannot do that. Delaying filing for insolvency is a crime in Germany. Unable to pay wages is reason enough to file for insolvency. German courts don't take that lightly.
They can go to jail, yes. But confiscation of property depends on the company type. Crytek is a "GmbH", which means that the property of the owners is usually safe, unless they unlawfully took assets out of the company.
Same for Australian corporations (directors become liable for knowingly trading while insolvent). Normally they're treated as completely separate legal entities, but not in this specific case. I'm sure there are instances of this in US law too: I'd always thought the term 'piercing the corporate veil' originated from the US...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI 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...
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.
Look, I'm not saying not getting your wages is just fine. But the world sure could use less Socialism-tinged concept-twisting.
Yeah, pretty much. They took work from you while you were (justifiably) assuming they were going to pay you. But you weren't looking at their true intentions or financial capability.
What's twisted about the concept?
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.
Unfortunately, HN is allergic to common sense.
Fucking with people's lives by not paying them cause your company is insolvent is morally unjustifiable, either you pay them for work done or tell them to not do said work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.