This week marks a significant new chapter in our engine, our services, and our commitment to the CRYENGINE community.
At GDC in San Francisco this week, we announced major updates which address some of the concerns and wishes our users have expressed over the past year.
CRYENGINE V, the newest iteration of the engine, is now available for a Pay What You Want model. This means developers everywhere can now name their own price for CRYENGINE and benefit from full engine source code with no royalties or obligations to use any additional services. Up to 70% of any contributions made to Crytek under this new model can be allocated to our newly created Indie Development Fund – a program that awards grants to indie creators developing their projects with CRYENGINE. We’re investing $1 million to start, and additional contributions will help fund indie games far into the future. We couldn’t think of a better way to align our interests with yours.
We’ve also put CRYENGINE on its own launcher, which means the current Engine-as-a-Service subscription model available on Steam will be retired. Having a dedicated CRYENGINE launcher is beneficial not only for version and project management, but also for access to another new service we launched this week – the CRYENGINE Marketplace. The Marketplace will enable developers to access individual assets from Crytek’s own library, as well as thousands of materials, sounds, and 3D objects created by the CRYENGINE community and other trusted vendors.
Beyond these changes, CRYENGINE V has new features and enhancements that developers have been requesting for some time. Being C# enabled allows people without C++ knowledge the ability to program in the engine. An optimized and customizable UI will make CRYENGINE easier to use, and our new CRYENGINE Answers on our website provides an additional resource for sharing and accumulating knowledge. There are a number of other exciting features, and in the coming weeks we will provide you with more info about them.
If you’d like a more detailed overview of all the changes we’ve introduced, a video of CRYENGINE Creative Director, Frank Vitz’s full announcement speech from GDC will be posted shortly.