Crytek Lays Off Developers in Budapest, Still Working with Kinect

An anonymous source inside developer Crytek has said that the company has fired 30 to 35 people that were working in its Budapest studio after Microsoft Games Studio has made the decision to more development of the game Codename: Kingdoms to the Frankfurt studio of the company.

Talking to Gamasutra the source said that the Budapest studio will not be closed down and that it will from now on focus on creating video games for tablet devices, although no specific games were mentioned.

The source says that the people who have been let go worked in fields like level design, quality assurance, IT infrastructure , art design and audio creation.

Avni Yerli, who is the managing director of the developer, issued an answer to the claims and said, “We can confirm that our Budapest studio is getting a new direction and focus.”

He did not offer any more details on the layoffs and has not said which Crytek projects might be affected.

The Crytek Budapest studio has been working on Codename: Kingdoms for more than 2 years and the game was initially showed off at the Microsoft press conference at the 2010 E3 trade show.

At the moment, Microsoft Games Studios and Crytek did not offer any clear details on the game, but since then it has emerged that the experience will be built around the motion tracking Kinect system from Microsoft.

Crytek is an independent developer which signs publishing deals for individual titles and it's not known why Microsoft Games Studios wanted to move development for Codename: Kingdoms to Frankfurt.

The company also has studios in: Kiev, Ukraine; Sofia, Bulgaria, Seoul, South Korea, Nottingham, the United Kingdom and Frankfurt.

This year Crytek launched Crysis 2 through Electronic Arts and so far the first-person shooter managed to ship more than 2 million copies.