Really Crytek!?!?

Sorry guys, just had to vent. I was just browsing around checking out Crytek’s new game engine CryEngine 3.. http://crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/overview

It looks amazing, and it seems they have worked in some sort of what you see is what you get editor called LiveCreate. Which is really appealing to someone like me who would love to jump in and play around creating a world and some sort of small, low key game. They even mention somewhere on their site that using this tool, anyone with access to some models, with little to no experience, could jump in and make a working game pretty easily.

All excited, I start browsing around hoping to find a place to download their sandbox tool, and I find their licensing page. Where they basically state they aren’t licensing the tool to individuals. They’re only providing it to legitimate game studios.

I question why they’d waste all of their time making a tool that’s accessible to people with little experience, only to make it not possible for those very people to use it. They need to take a note from Unity’s playbook and make their software available to EVERYONE ! Then if you do manage to make something, charge you to publish it! Not make the tool work for everyone, but not let anyone use it. WTF ?!

Yeah man I get what you’re saying. And it does sound frustrating not being able to use something that once caught your immediate interest. You should send them some day old donuts and work this out with their higher ups.

fail.

have a look at Unity

I liked CryTek back when it was just about 3 brothers making a great game with a great engine anyone could mod for free.

Right now (Under EA) they’re just going in the direction of Activision with user-locked and non editable content. I guess they figured out that letting people mod their games will give it a longer shelf life, thus potentially hurting sales of their next product.

Ah, I don’t care about them anymore, I’m with Unity.

last price I know for the licence was 1 million dollars (for cryengine 2)

my idea is that they developed something easy to use so a company may cut to the cost of production and still make money from the sales of the game after they purchased the engine for a truck of money.

but whatever excuse we may find they remain bitc$%*

Unfortunately Unity’s render engine doesn’t look half as nice as CryEngine 3, which is why I was so interested in it.

Isn’t ther something like training license or free tryout? Then if you cooked something up you could knock on a studio’s door with what you have.

aw that is lame! I saw the video of the editor about a month ago and it reminded me of far crys editor. Just drag and drop basically. I’ve been playing the multiplayer demo that came out a couple days ago and while the graphics look nice, the game play is meh..I am more interested in the single player campaign

I hear they will be a free version in summer.

zefs said
I hear they will be a free version in summer.

yeap, let’s hope for it:

http://www.develop-online.net/news/34466/Free-to-use-CryEngine-plans-emerge

http://www.shacknews.com/article/63275/free-cryengine-3-standalone-release

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-11-cryengine-3/711319 at the end