It is rumoured that Chinese gaming giant Tencent are looking to acquire CryTek, the maker of the game engine CryEngine, as well as popular games such as The Hunt, The Climb and Crysis. CryEngine was once popular in the AAA space, but has gone radio silent of late. The last release of CryEngine, CryEngine 5.6 was released all the way back in August 29, with mobile support and the new raytracing support still in development years later. To add insult to injury, Amazon have open sourced Lumberyard as O3DE, which is a competing game engine based on the same source code as CryEngine. Given Crytek’s prior financial woes, perhaps being acquired isn’t the worst idea.
The Tencent acquisition rumour comes care of German tabloid BILD (CryTek is based in Germany), in a series of tweets:
You can learn more about the future of CryEngine and details of the Tencent rumours in the video below. In the video I mistakenly called BILD a business publication, it is more of a traditional newspaper/tabloid.