Crysis 4: A Troubling Outlook for the Gaming Industry’s Future

Reports emerged last week indicating that Crytek was undergoing significant layoffs – and the future of the next installment in the Crysis series is now uncertain. This grim news took a back seat during this week’s DF Direct, following the team’s in-depth analysis of Sony’s State of Play event the previous day, and it is the primary topic I wanted to explore in a bit more depth here as the Direct goes live.

Ultimately, Crysis represents a cornerstone franchise for us at Digital Foundry, recognized for being an early pioneer of graphic technologies that would later characterize entire generations of PC and console games. This includes innovations such as screen-space ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and ray-marched volumetric lighting. However, one could write extensively about just how revolutionary the original game was – and Alex elaborated on this.

Crysis 3 and its Remastered version have also long been part of the DF benchmark suite for CPU and GPU evaluations – I recall the “Highly Explosive Materials” sequence and the debate between Prophet and Psycho early in Welcome to the Jungle are etched in my memory after countless benchmarking runs. With that in mind, Crysis 4 has been eagerly awaited by the entire team since the game was revealed back in 2022, especially in an industry where proprietary game engines are increasingly challenged by the prevalence of Unreal Engine.

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:11 News 1: State of Play: Tides of Annihilation
• 0:09:37 MindsEye
• 0:16:38 Days Gone Remastered
• 0:22:28 Saros
• 0:29:12 Dreams of Another
• 0:36:59 Lost Soul Aside
• 0:41:39 Other games: Borderlands 4, Sonic Racing Crossworlds, Onimusha, Night Walk
• 0:59:34 State of Play – The Verdict
• 1:06:43 News 2: Crysis 4 placed “on hold” as Crytek lays off personnel
• 1:16:24 News 3: Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC specifications released
• 1:36:32 News 4: Astro Bot receives PS5 Pro upgrade
• 1:42:59 Viewer Q1: After three months, what do you think of the PS5 Pro and PSSR?
• 1:52:53 Viewer Q2: Why don’t more developers use CryEngine?
• 1:59:40 Viewer Q3: Will Nvidia “gate” new AI features to their latest hardware?
• 2:09:17 Viewer Q4: Does RTX Mega Geometry eliminate the need for proxy geometry for RT?
• 2:15:17 Viewer Q5: Can Oliver discuss some of the latest advancements in AI technology?
• 2:26:52 Viewer Q6: How much do you need to invest in a GPU for a good gaming experience?

Now, the prospect of a new mainline Crysis installment seems further away than ever. The Crytek layoffs are substantial, affecting around 60 members or 15 percent of the workforce, and come after Crysis 4 director Mattias Engström departed in November last year to return to Hitman developer IO Interactive. In addition to the immediate impact on the livelihoods of the affected developers, it is hard to envision that the ongoing Crysis 4 project will not be restarted in the near future given the situation. The focus of the studio’s remaining developers has shifted to the live service extraction shooter Hunt: Showdown 1896, as the studio strives to become “financially sustainable“.

As Alex points out in the Direct, Crytek has encountered hurdles since as far back as Crysis 2, despite the engine’s relative acclaim and the moderate success of its games. The engine’s (largely unmerited) reputation for poor performance impacted its adoption by console developers, and currently, CryEngine is less utilized than it once was – despite being the basis for the recently released Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The company’s ventures into multiple studios and VR projects do not appear to have yielded the returns that studio heads probably anticipated, and it is unclear whether the recent Crysis remasters have recouped their investment. Nevertheless, Crytek was recognized as the largest independent game developer in Germany as recently as mid-2024.

It is evident that while Crysis 4 could have provided the boost the studio needed, significant game releases are becoming increasingly time-consuming and expensive to develop – especially if you also have to deliver the next major iteration of your in-house game engine to meet the expectations of a boundary-pushing PC release. The pressure of anticipation for Crysis is nearly akin to that of Half-Life among PC enthusiasts, so it is perhaps not surprising that the development of Crysis 4 has been delayed at best.

Looking ahead, perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Crysis 4 development team is tasked with creating a smaller-scale Crysis spin-off, something that could utilize whatever technologies and resources were already in development without the overwhelming expectations of a numbered sequel. If that were to be executed well – and potentially put CryEngine back on the radar