Crytek To Lay Off 40 Employees After E3, Shifts Project

Crytek co-founder Avni Yerli has confirmed that the company has already laid off nine staff members, and will be laying off over 30 staff from their Budapest office after E3 closes next month. The Budapest staff had been working on an Xbox 360 Kinect game for the better part of the last two years, which has supposedly since been transferred to Crytek’s Frankfurt headquarters. The remaining 35 employees at the Budapest facility will be shifting the focus to titles developed solely for tablets.

According to Gamasutra, an anonymous source claims the redundancies (which is the far superior European term for layoffs) are due to a “sudden decision” by Microsoft Game Studios to relocate the project away from the Budapest offices. The Kinect game, purportedly called Codename: Kingdoms, is slated to make an appearance at E3 next month.