CryEngine Also Switching to Monthly Subscription Plan

Steven Bogos

The Taco Man
Jan 17, 2013
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CryEngine Also Switching to Monthly Subscription Plan


Not to be one-upped by Unreal [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133059-Epic-Games-Makes-Unreal-Engine-4-Publicly-Available-for-19-Per-Month], a CryEngine subscription will only set you back $10 a month.

Earlier, Epic Games made a landmark decision [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133059-Epic-Games-Makes-Unreal-Engine-4-Publicly-Available-for-19-Per-Month] in deciding to make its Unreal 4 engine available to anyone and everyone for the low subscription price of just $19 per month. Crytek, not one to be one-upped by Unreal, has returned fire, announcing that its own CryEngine will also be switching to a subscription model, albeit, for the even lower price of $10 a month. Best of all, for aspiring indie devs, there will be no additional royalties or licensing fees on top of the $10 monthly subscription.

"As a first tier of its new program, Crytek has revealed that from May this year, indie developers will be able to use all of CryEngine's cutting-edge features for a monthly subscription fee of 9.90 USD/EUR per user - royalty free. Those features include the recently announced addition of CryEngine features such as Physically Based Shading, Geometry Cache and Image Based Lighting - an upgrade already shown in action by Crytek at this year's GDC conference in San Francisco."

Carl Jones, Crytek's Director of Business Development, said: "When we announced the new CryEngine this was our first step towards creating an engine as a service. We are happy to announce now that the latest update of CryEngine will soon be available to all developers on a subscription basis. We are really excited to make CryEngine available to hundreds of thousands of developers working with Crytek to make awesome games."

CryEngine is the technology that powers Crytek's own games, such as Crysis and Ryse: Son of Rome, as well as third-party titles such as State of Decay and MechWarrior Online.

This is fantastic news for small developers, who now have an actual choice between the "big three" (Unreal, Unity, Crytek) when choosing which engine they want to use.

Source: Crytek [http://www.cryengine.com/news/crytek-announces-its-cryengine-as-a-service-program]

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lacktheknack

Je suis joined jewels.
Jan 19, 2009
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Well, that was fast.

Say what you want about Crytek's games, they certainly have a well-oiled machine going over there.
 

mirage202

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Mar 13, 2012
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On of those more amusing games of one upping the industry can play.

Well done good sirs, nurture those indies. Maybe they stop pumping out puzzle platformers and other various copies of things that make it big.
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

(Insert witty quote here)
Sep 10, 2008
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I wonder how much of the decision to include subscription models was driven by Unity's push toward indies.
 

Agayek

Ravenous Gormandizer
Oct 23, 2008
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Steven Bogos said:
"As a first tier of its new program, Crytek has revealed that from May this year, indie developers will be able to use all of CryEngine's cutting-edge features for a monthly subscription fee of 9.90 USD/EUR per user - royalty free. Those features include the recently announced addition of CryEngine features such as Physically Based Shading, Geometry Cache and Image Based Lighting - an upgrade already shown in action by Crytek at this year's GDC conference in San Francisco."
Speaking as someone who works in the software industry, the precise wording of this is... worrying.

Typically, per-user agreements take the form of "If your product has 1,000,000 end-users, you pay us for each one of those 1,000,000 users". Which means that, to use CryEngine, the more copies of the game you sell, the more you have to pay. The company I work at had a deal like that with Comcast for a long time.

They may well mean "user of the engine kit/tools" (and in fact, they probably do, considering the price is absurdly high for a per-user agreement), in which case my worries are unfounded, but it stuck out to me as a bothersome detail. I could easily see it being a flat per-user rate instead of Epic's percentage rate. There's business advantages and disadvantages for both, and I could see CryTek going that route simply to differentiate themselves more from Epic's model.
 

Canadamus Prime

Robot in Disguise
Jun 17, 2009
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Now how the hell does that work? Do they have to keep paying the subscription fee for as long as their game is on the market?
 

Agayek

Ravenous Gormandizer
Oct 23, 2008
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canadamus_prime said:
Now how the hell does that work? Do they have to keep paying the subscription fee for as long as their game is on the market?
It should only be a sub while the game is actively being worked on (read: someone is using the tools they provide to development new content/improve old content).

Not sure if that's how it actually works, but that's usually the way things go.
 

Canadamus Prime

Robot in Disguise
Jun 17, 2009
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Agayek said:
canadamus_prime said:
Now how the hell does that work? Do they have to keep paying the subscription fee for as long as their game is on the market?
It should only be a sub while the game is actively being worked on (read: someone is using the tools they provide to development new content/improve old content).

Not sure if that's how it actually works, but that's usually the way things go.
Either way, it still doesn't make much sense to me.
 

Rad Party God

Party like it's 2010!
Feb 23, 2010
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lacktheknack said:
Well, that was fast.

Say what you want about Crytek's games, they certainly have a well-oiled machine going over there.
To be fair, Crysis 1 and Warhead were pretty good and Crysis 2 was pretty decent.

OT: Let's hope this helps indie devs to do something cool out of this.
 

Agayek

Ravenous Gormandizer
Oct 23, 2008
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canadamus_prime said:
Either way, it still doesn't make much sense to me.
What doesn't make sense about the latter? They charge a development company $X per month while said company is using their software.

Think of it like, say, Netflix. You pay the monthly fee, and you have access to all the video files that you want to watch for that month. Once you stop paying, you can no longer access the videos.

It's the same thing here. You pay CryTek, then you get to use the CryEngine development tools (like modelling software, AI descriptors, etc) for the period you paid them for. You stop paying, then you can no longer use the dev tools.

It's pretty standard subscription software.

The only thing that might be a little wonky with it is the pricing model, and that's just cuz of ambiguous wording.
 

cerebus23

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May 16, 2010
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canadamus_prime said:
Agayek said:
canadamus_prime said:
Now how the hell does that work? Do they have to keep paying the subscription fee for as long as their game is on the market?
It should only be a sub while the game is actively being worked on (read: someone is using the tools they provide to development new content/improve old content).

Not sure if that's how it actually works, but that's usually the way things go.
Either way, it still doesn't make much sense to me.
Suppose you could argue it like this they are leasing you their engine to make a game they let you use it for a per game fee on each game sold later than say the 100s of thousands or millions they would want up front if they sold you the engine.

They i would imagine make way more money that way in general, barring any utter fails that make no money.

Its not wholly unreasonable but the fee involved per game i would think a few dollars in like the 2 or 3 range if we talking millions of games sold. would be more than fair compensation in a lease vs buy situation. but i am no accountant.

Its rather cool smaller devs have roads into working on cryengine outside a few select teams. or that indy game makers in general have way more options in engines and gfx quality. i do hope it fair for all side though.
 

Canadamus Prime

Robot in Disguise
Jun 17, 2009
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Agayek said:
canadamus_prime said:
Either way, it still doesn't make much sense to me.
What doesn't make sense about the latter? They charge a development company $X per month while said company is using their software.

Think of it like, say, Netflix. You pay the monthly fee, and you have access to all the video files that you want to watch for that month. Once you stop paying, you can no longer access the videos.

It's the same thing here. You pay CryTek, then you get to use the CryEngine development tools (like modelling software, AI descriptors, etc) for the period you paid them for. You stop paying, then you can no longer use the dev tools.

It's pretty standard subscription software.

The only thing that might be a little wonky with it is the pricing model, and that's just cuz of ambiguous wording.
Yes, but you're not developing any new products from the content you get off Netflix (or at least you shouldn't be). So I'm rather unclear how that's supposed to work.
 

Arnoxthe1

Elite Member
Dec 25, 2010
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Well, with UE4, you're actually getting a lot more with your sub fee plus 5%. Tech support, open access to the engine source, and a bunch of assets and such that can be made use of whichever way you want.
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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First - Elaborate engine tech demos, erm, i mean games. Now the engine going for cheap. This looks good for CryEngine. I personally love how that engine treats things and would love more games running on it. It also seems to be able to scale extremely well from very low end machines to giving even the 2000 dollar beast setups a workout.

The problem however as i see is a lot of developers claiming its "Hard to work with" which may deter them somewhat.

Arnoxthe1 said:
Well, with UE4, you're actually getting open access to the engine source.
Do you have a source for this, because the escapist article on that said that your just getting acess to the editor, you know, the kind of thats free for UE3
 

Smooth Operator

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Oct 5, 2010
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Certainly a better deal to start with, but they don't seem to tell you the full details of this unless you contact them directly. There might be royalty fees later on that they haven't told anyone about yet.

The upside is that for now you can still get the CryEngine SDK for free as it was up until these new subscription shenanigans, anyone interested in using it might want to get a move on.
 

josemlopes

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Jun 9, 2008
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Strazdas said:
First - Elaborate engine tech demos, erm, i mean games. Now the engine going for cheap. This looks good for CryEngine. I personally love how that engine treats things and would love more games running on it. It also seems to be able to scale extremely well from very low end machines to giving even the 2000 dollar beast setups a workout.

The problem however as i see is a lot of developers claiming its "Hard to work with" which may deter them somewhat.

Arnoxthe1 said:
Well, with UE4, you're actually getting open access to the engine source.
Do you have a source for this, because the escapist article on that said that your just getting acess to the editor, you know, the kind of thats free for UE3
Its in here:
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/welcome-to-unreal-engine-4

and here:
https://www.unrealengine.com/register

Not bad, I guess it works for both depending on what type of game an indie dev wants to make.
 

Vivi22

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Aug 22, 2010
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Arnoxthe1 said:
Well, with UE4, you're actually getting a lot more with your sub fee plus 5%. Tech support, open access to the engine source, and a bunch of assets and such that can be made use of whichever way you want.
Not to mention Epic has years of their engines being used on hundreds of games going for them. Almost no one outside of Crytek has actually licensed the engine for their titles that I know of. That difference in support and tools development experience matters a lot.
 

Mister Chippy

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Jun 12, 2013
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Well, Ryse was one of the prettiest demos for an engine I've ever seen, despite Microsoft trying to pretend that it was actually a demo for their shitty hardware. I may need to pick this up just to play around with it a little.