Crytek, the renowned game developer and publisher announced the launch of its “Engine-as-a-Service” (EaaS) program, making its game development engine more easily accessible to developers.
CRYENGINE was used to power next generation games like Ryse: Son of Rome and will permit development across all platforms.
Starting from May this year, indie developers can access CRYENGINE by paying a monthly subscription fee of 9.9.$. More interestingly, no royalty has to be paid to Crytek for games developed using the engine.
Features of the updated CRYENGINE include Physically Based Shading, Geometry Cache and Image Based Lighting – all of which were shown in action by Crytek at GDC, San Francisco.
The CRYENGINE free SDK will also continue to be available under its current terms but any developer wanting to take advantage of the new features of CRYENGINE will need to subscribe to the new EaaS-Program.
Crytek’s Director of Business Development , Carl Jones, said: “When we announced the new CRYENGINE this was our first step towards creating an engine as a service. We are happy to announce now that the latest update of CRYENGINE will soon be available to all developers on a subscription basis. We are really excited to make CRYENGINE available to hundreds of thousands of developers working with Crytek to make awesome games.”
Crytek’s announcement comes hot on the heels of a similar announcement by Epic Games where they too shifted to a subscription based model. Epic however asks you to pay 19$ a month and also demands a royalty of 5% of the gross revenue. With big engines becoming a more viable option due to such subscriptions, indie developers are surely celebrating.
