"We'll get you next time.... No, I promise, the check is in the mail. Really. YES REALLY! Now don't walk out and let's finish this game, ok?"

I said it was effective, not smart. :P

And on that note I gotta go to bed.

Few months back during last Christmas or so I had similar situation.
Leaving about 10-20 old employees everyone else got "fired", because management decided to bring a middleman to run power plant.
I received my final check last week, almost a year after losing my job.
Saving that for one last gamble of my life.

But continueing to work without pay is also not a good option. I would probably only do that for a very, very short time and look for other jobs intensively during that time.

What I think is the crucial point here is that Crytek itself still exists and therefore I think it should be responsible for paying all the employees of all its studios for as long as they exist. Whatever is left of Crytek should be sued and pay the legal fees additionally on top of the missing salaries.

Closing a studio - that is life, but not doing your contractional duties (paying the salaries) while still continueing to exist is not nice. If they cannot pay their employees they should go into insolvency. If you just choose not to pay their employees then they are really bad employers and working for free for them won't do good.

It happens more often than you'd think.
I'm sure the employees had feelers out, but simply quitting was probably too big a risk.

So, no "can run Crysis" jokes anymore?

That explains why Crysis was released here lol..

i like to think of crytek as all the success epic games and unreal engine have, but the opposite.

"How is this even possible?"

Lack of business savvy, that's how. Or sheer idiocy, you decide.

Mistake number 1:
A couple of years back they announced a change of strategy, going into F2P which was the hot shit at the time. But instead of betting on their established brands and technologies as a business backbone to finance their F2P endeavours they pretty much closed up shop for everything but F2P.

Of course this failed spectacularly and almost killed the company until they were bailed out through a multi million dollar deal with amazon. Now anyone with a shred of common sense would have put their company on solid footing again by focusing on what made them famous and successful the first time around. But...

Mistake number 2:
Instead they chose to throw everything into VR this time. Because what could generate more revenue than a budding technology that won't be mass market for at least another couple of years, right?

tl;dr
Two idiotic strategic moves without any fail-safes in a row will most likely make Crytek go bye-bye...

Um, releasing it here was most likely EA's call, they're the ones who own the rights to the franchise. Crytek were just the Devs.

pirate cryteks games!

Ummm... WTF?

I haven't been paid in eleven years.

While it was most likely EA's call to release them here (they are the publishers, after all), Crytek still retains ownership of the series.

From Crysis' EULA:

That's not completely correct in this particular case, as far as I know. I was once told that Crytek's deal with EA allowed them to keep more rights to their stuff than is actually common. Don't know if anything about that has changed over the years but I guess there's a chance that EA could not just release Crytek games whenever and wherever they want without Crytek's agreement.

Either way, the company sucks, and considering for how long they've been in trouble and mistreating their employees I'm shocked they still have anyone working there. Not to mention: it's Germany, for frigg's sake, one would think some court would have put an end to this shit ages ago.