Cevat Yerli Stepped Down as Crytek’s CEO

Crytek has been going through a lot lately. There were rumors of salaries not being paid, people fired, studios “reorganized”. So today’s departure of Cevat Yerli is not really a surprise.

The man himself has stepped down as the CEO and president of Crytek. As Gamasutra reports, he will be succeeded by his brothers Avni and Faruk. The recent change will not influence the work on Hunt: Showdown and Warface.

Cevat Yerli is a prominent figure in the history of Crytek. He and his team launched an impressive demo  The X-Isle: Dinosaur Island in 2001. Later this project turned into a FarCry. The demo was intensely technical: sporting a then-unseen level of detail and draw distance. Later he moved from beind solely a Technical and Creative Director and started working as a CEO, helping R&D and handling the management.

If you ask any engine developer, who worked on complicated rendering problems, about Cevat Yerli you’re almost certainly hear some good words. His tech really was (and in many cases still is) ahead of his time. It was used in a countless number of games and partially powers some of the most powerful engines today (like Lumberyard and Cryengine). So seeing him go away is just a bit sad.