Crytek plans indie-friendly CryEngine licensing

Epic's indie-friendly Unreal Development Kit is to receive competition from Crytek and its Crysis 2-powering CryEngine.

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Crytek is planning a low-cost version of its Crysis 2-powering CryEngine, akin to Epic's Unreal Development Kit, company co-founder Avni Yerli has told Develop. While there are no concrete details for now, it's good to hear.

"We have a business model in mind for this--which I can't get into details of right now--but it will be extremely user-friendly," Yerli said. "The barriers for entry will be very low, and perhaps even for free. Of course this will be compared to UDK and Unity and so on, but we think this sort of competition is very good for the community."

Epic Games' Unreal Development Kit is a standalone version of the ever-popular Unreal Engine 3, free for non-commercial and educational use. It's also handy for indie commercial titles, as developers can start work without paying hefty licensing fees up front. Instead, they accept to pay a 25% royalty rate on sales past the first $50,000. Lovely-looking mech combat FPS Hawken is one such commercial UDK project.

Free CryEngine 3 licenses have been offered to educational institutes since 2009.

Crytek clearly hasn't finalised its plans, so it'd be inadvisable to hold your breath just yet. As Yerli said more choice and competition will be good for developers not blessed with big budgets.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    March 16, 2011 11:45 AM

    Comment on Crytek plans indie-friendly CryEngine licensing, by Alice O'Connor.

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      March 16, 2011 12:51 PM

      This is kind of the obvious thing to do for Crytek; and it can only lead to good things for everyone..
      The real question is: which engine is easier to tackle for wanabee developpers?

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        March 16, 2011 1:38 PM

        The one that costs nothing to download and install.

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        March 16, 2011 7:30 PM

        Based on same of the stuff people have done with CryEngine 2/Crysis, and what I've seen in GDC presentations, it's powerful and relatively easy to use. They've put a lot of effort into making CryEngine 3 something suitable for external licensing.

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      March 16, 2011 3:16 PM

      This is aweeeesome
      :D

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      March 16, 2011 3:34 PM

      Anything that will help reduce the amount of UE3 powered games is good news to me.

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        March 16, 2011 5:40 PM

        Seriously; UE3 is becoming as cliché, overused, and notoriously janky as RenderWare and Gamebryo.

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          March 16, 2011 5:57 PM

          Totally agreed with you guys. It's a nice engine but it's always great to have diversity in the marketplace from other good engines also.

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            March 16, 2011 5:57 PM

            That and Epic seriously has some blowhards as their spokepeople. They need to be humbled.

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          March 16, 2011 7:32 PM

          I'm just sick of UE3 games with horrible mouse smoothing issues. They pretty much all have it.

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          March 16, 2011 7:34 PM

          yeah. I hate how it dithers textures :( Always hated that since UE1. Only game which was passable was Mirror's Edge, but that had backed-in GI up the wazoo.

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          March 17, 2011 9:03 AM

          It's not that it's bad, but rather it's eye fatigue. It's kind of sad when you can look at a game and know that it is UE3 since lot of them seem to have some blurry bloomy hazy look to them.

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        March 17, 2011 8:54 AM

        [deleted]

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