Amazon Went Prime and Licensed Crytek’s CryEngine

Amazon broke out the big bucks to acquire a licensing deal for Crytek's proprietary CryEngine while the Germany-based company was approaching financial ruin. Hopefully, they got free shipping.

Throughout 2014, Crytek was facing the brink of financial ruin, until a mysterious benefactor saved the company through a licensing deal for its CryEngine tech, Kotaku reports. While this deal happened late last year, sources are finally shedding light that Amazon was the company Crytek partnered with to keep it afloat.

“It was a huge one, probably the biggest one,” Crytek co-founder Faruk Yerli said last month about the licensing deal. “I can’t say anything more in detail, but hopefully we’ll be able to announce it with the partner soon.”

Mind you, the Faruk's sibling, Crytek co-founder and CEO Cevat Yerli, had some harsh words for the multitude of Crytek employees who left the company after they weren't being paid for significant amounts of time due to the company's financial blunders.

This deal falls in line with Amazon's plans to legitimize Amazon Game Studios as it has been acquiring various studios and developers in order to make its own lines of noteworthy games, particularly focused on its Fire devices and the Android formats. Unfortunately, the masses don't really want to buy an Amazon phone or tablet, so these Fire products have been quite underwhelming in a market that is dominated by the likes of HTC, Apple and Samsung. As a result, Amazon has been expanding its formerly Fire device-exclusive games over to the iOS format to spark sales, given that the average consumer won't make a Fire device their go-to tablet, smartphone or set-top box just so they can gain access to Amazon's formerly exclusive game library. Nevertheless, Amazon has acquired the likes of the Killer Instinct reboot team at Double Helix Games and other noteworthy studios in trying to develop its own games.

Due to the underwhelming sales of Amazon's Fire phones, tablets and set-top boxes, the company could try to use its resources and start producing console games on its own with all of the gaming-related resources it has acquired over the past few years. Multiple sources have led to inconclusive reports of what Amazon paid for the CryEngine, ranging from $50-70 million. Nevertheless, this licensing pulled Crytek out of the grave, as it was facing significant financial woes through 2014. It's rather hard to take Amazon for anything other than being that massive online store where we buy all our stuff from, but we're willing to give it a chance if its games eventually reach major consoles.