Financially troubled studio Crytek has signed a deal with Amazon that will help offset its 2014 losses in what was a fairly disastrous financial year for the company, according to sources cited by Kotaku.
This matches up with that mystery deal Crytek teased last month, which the firm’s co-founder Faruk Yerli described as ”a huge one, probably the biggest one” in its history.
Kotaku cites four people familiar with the deal” who revealed that the deal was valued between $50 and $70 million, enough for Crytek to recover from its not insignificant financial problems, which lead last year to staff wages being unpaid and several high-profile developers leaving.
What Amazon intends to do with the CryEngine isn’t clear, but the company has been itching to get into the games market for a long time, recently signing up Elite developer Frontier for a new project, and hiring experienced industry figures Clint Hocking and Kim Swift as designers.
Kotaku mentions in the same article that some of its sources believe that rather than using the CryEngine to create new games, Amazon intends to use it to create a brand new game engine. Neither Crytek nor Amazon has yet responded to any of these rumours.
