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The license is basically you can use the engine for free with no royalties. Our model is Pay What You Want: https://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine

Basically you pay whatever you want, if you want, and have a choice of how much of that goes to the developers and how much goes to an Indie Fund that we use to fund indie projects that use the engine.

We also offer "Insider Memberships" (https://www.cryengine.com/get-cryengine/service-packages) for studios that want some closer support from us, trainings, etc.

5 comments

Wow. I really hope that works out for you... (and that this decision wasn't born out of desperation)

Because I really like this pricing model (and your engine) and I hope it will become standard over time ... but at the moment unfortunately it isn't and still too many people and companys won't pay anything if they don't have to. So good luck to you.

with unreal, unity and other things having zero cost (up front anyways); the playing field has changed.

>The license is basically you can use the engine for free with no royalties.

When you review the license, it is really not like this. Only games made explicitly for "entertainment purposes" can use the engine -- even "Serious Games", which I guess means games that may straddle any actual utility, are not allowed. Most likely Kerbal Space Program would be considered excessively "scientific" and not allowed to use CryEngine.

There's also a very scary clause that essentially says "if we don't like your game we can classify it as objectionable and withdraw your license".

This is a cool release from an academic standpoint, but should probably not be used by real people for real projects with the license as-is. There are many excellent truly open-source game engine options.

> There are many excellent truly open-source game engine options.

i'm not sure what you mean by "truly open-source"; what "game engine options" are you referring to?

>i'm not sure what you mean by "truly open-source"

Software distributed under a license approved by the OSI. These licenses, as far as I know, place no limitations on the type of speech that can be produced with licensed software. To use CryEngine, the people who work at CryTek must not find any of your project's content "objectionable".

>what "game engine options" are you referring to?

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

http://www.ogre3d.org/

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d

https://github.com/id-Software

and many others; I'm sure there are big lists floating around. All of the engines listed here can be used even if the authors of the engine disagree with what you want to say, and I believe they've all been used in real, honest-to-goodness commercial games.

Unfortunately nothing in your list even comparable to UE and CryEngine. Ogre is just graphics engine (not game engine). idTech have great code, but it's even released dated and it's lack of tools.

Irrlicht and Torque is good options for small indie games (actually there many more great engines for small games), but they still can't be compared with "big" commercial engines.

This is nice, but can you please disclose the political views of your lawyers and C-suite? It seems that if a user happens to have a subjective political disagreement with someone at CryTek, the license to use CryEngine can be revoked per section 2.4, which states:

"use the CryEngine for the development of any Games which are harmful, abusive, racially or ethnically offensive, vulgar, sexually explicit, defamatory, infringing, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, or in a reasonable person's view, objectionable;"

Just checking but you do realize Creative Commons Licenses have this same clause. They call it "moral rights". When I asked about it I was told it's a right many countries require them to respect so it's in the license.

Note: I'm just as horrified as you about that clause but it's in every CC license AFAICT

> if a user happens to have a subjective political disagreement

given that politics tends to be much more qualitative than quantitative, it's unclear that any "political disagreement" can be anything other than "subjective".

Yes, I agree. I added "subjective" not because it uniquely qualifies the type of political disagreement, but because it emphasizes that your game's life is dependent on never having a simple disagreement with any present or future employee of CryTek. If the license to the engine is pulled, it would probably mean you have to start your project over from scratch.

There's also "enterprise licensing" which is probably where CryTek hopes the big money will come from. It's essentially moving the company towards more of a consulting business kind of model. That's the way I read it at least.

Sounds a lot like Red Hat's business model to me.