It's WAR! Not real war, with bombs and screaming, but tech war, with payment models and indie schmoozing. Last night, Epic unveiled their subscription plan for Unreal Engine 4, offering the binary development tools and engine source for $19 per month. Now, Crytek have announced their own "CryEngine-as-a-service" subscription model. It has a couple of advantages over Epic's plan: it's cheaper, at $9.90 per month, and it's royalty free.
"CRYENGINE gives users access to the same award-winning toolset that was used to create Crytek's Ryse: Son of Rome," explain Crytek in a press release , "and equips them to develop outstanding games across all of today's leading platforms." Subscribers will get full use of the engine's features, including Physically Based Shading, Geometry Cache and Image Based Lighting, whatever they are . As an added bonus, it was also announced that the CryEngine now supports Linux development.
The royalty free offer could be significant. Under Epic's plan, developers will pay 5% of any revenue earned from Unreal Engine 4 games. Crytek, meanwhile, seem happy to get their engine into use. That said, they also say this is a "first tier" of their plan, with any additional options currently unannounced. The CryEngine-as-a-service program will be available to indies from May.
As proof of what their engine can achieve, Crytek released two showcase trailers for GDC. The first collects the graphical splendour of their full-fat CryEngine, as used for Star Citizen and Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
The second is a showcase of the CryEngine Free SDK, available for non-commercial projects. That it's an equally pretty round-up is a promising showcase of what indies could achieve with the full tool.
