Crytek Plans Free Version of CryENGINE 3

Develop reports that Crytek, makers of the Far Cry series, the Crysis series, and the game engines behind them, have plans to release a free-to-use version of CryENGINE 3, the software's latest iteration. Quoting: "Unreal vendor Epic Games and Unity have both seen their user-bases mushroom overnight since launching versions of their own engines that, while tied to different royalty rates, are completely free to download and operate. Now the CryEngine 3 group has revealed it wants to tap into this thriving market. The firm's CEO Cevat Yerli told Develop that Crytek already gives away a CryEngine 2 editor to the mod community, but explained that Crytek's expansion strategy stretches beyond. 'We have a very vivid community of users and modders and content creators, and usually that's a great way of unlocking the engine,' he said. ... 'So far that's what we've been offering for free, and it's easy entry into the production environment. [But] we do want to make a standalone free platform that people can run independent of CryEngine that will also be up to speed with the latest engine.'"

Re:The future

[Rogerborg]

As an active member of the indie game development community, let me be the first to inform you that indie "original game design" consists largely of "Team Fortress, with Boba Fett", or if you're in the Far East, "Team Fortress, with furries".

Re:Ok.. now if there were OSS engines of this qual

[Carthag]

what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?

A game engine has one or more of the following: physics, AI, a tool chain for content generation, a scripting language or similar for game rules, etc.

A graphics engine only displays the graphics.

Re:Ok.. now if there were OSS engines of this qual

[SpeZek]

Far Cry used the same engine [as Crysis]

No it didn't. Crysis was Cryengine 2.

Re:The engine battle:

[RogueyWon]

Actually, it feels like I'm seeing far more games running on the Unreal engine these days than I am on anything id have put out. Gears of War games, Mass Effect games, Bioshock games, loads of stuff from Square-Enix, god knows how many others... they're all on the Unreal 3 engine. By contrast, the only vaguely recent game I can remember on an id engine was Wolfenstein. And frankly, that looked pretty mediocre compared to the competition.

In fact, yes, looking at the "list of games that use this engine" on wikipedia, it's fairly clear that the Unreal Engine 3 is being used for a huge number of commercial games, while id's engines are starting to look distinctly niche and only seem to be used by developers with strong historic links to id.