Crytek, the well-known developer of CryENGINE, announced a new IP and a new game studio. The new studio, which is based in Kiev, is also the next step in the growth of the company.

"Our Kiev studio has been recruiting and growing for the past year and a half. The highly talented team there has undergone an intensive training period, and in that time they have made an invaluable contribution to our production in Frankfurt" said Faruk Yerli, Managing Director of Crytek.

Also, Yerli announced that the new studio will develop a new project, which of course will be based on CryENGINE, but he didn’t disclose any other details.

"Now that our CryENGINE 2 middleware has reached the point of maturity where it can be used to support both different types and styles of games, and run on multiple platforms, we thought it was the optimum time to begin work on a new project based on our own new and original intellectual property, and elevate the Kiev operation to full studio status."

The first CryENGINE2 licensing agreement was announced at GDC 2007, for a project called Terraformed Mars, a massively multiplayer virtual world (MMVW), developed by Avatar Reality - "a new development entity dedicated to the advancement of online community building".

Avatar Reality also stands out as a studio formed (in December 2006) by a couple of imposing guys: Henk Rogers, founder of The Tetris Company (among others); and Kazuyuki Hashimoto, former higher-up at Electronic Arts and at Square.