Overwritten.net
Games => General Gaming => Topic started by: idolminds on Tuesday, March 15, 2016, 01:27:54 PM
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Story (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-15-crytek-announces-cryengine-5-adopts-pay-what-you-want-model)
Newest version of CryEngine lets developers pay...you know, whatever. There is even a humble bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/cryengine-bundle) containing a bunch of assets to use in making a game. It's amazing how we've come to the point where almost all the big name engines are basically free to download and use.
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How does anyone make money if they just give it away? Is it a back-end deal, where they get a percentage of sales of products that use these engines? Otherwise, I don't understand the motivation.
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Right. id Software and Epic used to charge hundreds of thousands to use their engines.
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Do many dev's use CryEngine, when compared to Id Tech Engines or Unreal Engines?
That could be one of the motivations here - Crytek's Engine are nowhere used as widespread by dev's as the other 2.
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Cobra, engines like Unreal and Unity will take a cut of a games sales once it passes some threshold. Crytek seems to be relying on the generosity of its users because from what I can tell there is no clause like that for CryEngine.
And yeah D, thats the trouble fro Crytek. No one is making use of their engine. Part of the problem they are having, and other engines have the same problem, is that Unreal and Unity have a major positive feedback loop working for them. The engines are well documented, which made more people use them, which helped keep the documentation up to date. Now that so many developers have experience working in either of those engines why would they switch to something else that that'd have to waste time getting the hang of?
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That makes sense. Unreal is also known to scale well to different hardware targets, whereas Crytek has had a reputation for requiring beefy hardware. That probably makes it even worse. (I have barely heard about Unity.)