Sounds good until you notice that they are stopping development of the free CRYENGINE SDK that allowed people to make non-profit games and making them move to the service subscription if they want new features.
Of course, the kicker is how they define "indies". Still, it seems like an irresistible deal, especially considering they have a free version as well. No source code like you get with Unreal Engine 4, but also no 5% royalty.
I do, and, honestly, I'm not a huge fan. The editor is fairly slick but the code base is an absolute rat's nest. If I want the power of a full-blown this-gen engine, I'd turn to Unreal; if I want rapid iteration and relatively painless development while sacrificing some (not all!) power, I'd turn to Unity.
But that's just me! Your mileage may certainly vary depending on what your project needs.
I think Frosbite 2 beats Cryengine in terms of realistic graphics, but too bad they're not licensing that to 3rd parties. Frostbite 2's color seems a little off/too light in those demos, though, but UE4's color is way off. Why does everything look like it was put through an orange filter?
I'm sure cryengine is great, but the methodology in those videos looks pretty dodgy... It appears that they're comparing random completely different scenes in each engine, whose only similarity is their general subject ("scene with palm tree!").
There are a lot of variables that go into how the end result looks, only some of which have to do with the capability of the underlying engine, and they don't even seem to be trying to account/adjust for such factors....
Not personally, but I know people who have. On the whole the artist tools are pretty good, those who actually have to code against it and dig into the source tended to end up hating it.
Crytek is totally making this up on the fly to respond to Unreal. They may have had something like this in the works, but they were totally caught off guard by this. They have no site and no idea what the licensing will be.
I'm guessing the hint is in their wording, CryEngine as a service. They're looking to shift to making money off the engine from services they provide to developers (eg a marketplace for assets, or any number of a dozen other possibilities).
It's only for "indies" without definition of what indie means. It might mean that you have revenue under 10k for example and after that you will have to pay 30%, they haven't told any additional details yet.
After all this engine race to mass adoption, I'd focus on,
1. Developing assets (textures, sprites, sounds).
2. Developing gameplay.
3. Developing game engine plugins.
4. Hire all of the above and profit (I'm at 2).
But, if you're insisting in developing a new engine, please first read all the code that's been released, and if you can, send them patches until they hire you.
So if i make my game in one month , release it . Then does that mean that i will only have to pay them ~10 $ for that month right.
I won't have to pay them anything else right ?
$10/month, per user. Steeper than it sounds, unless the "user" is the indie dev and not all of the indie dev's app users... or is it each developer who works with the engine at the Indie dev shop? Not entirely clear in the article.
$10 per user per month would be nuts, you'd pass the full sticker price of even AAA titles in half a year, and makes no sense for 'one time cost' products, how long do you pay a monthly fee for? The lead in sentence is "indie developers will be able to use..." so I would interpret this as a "per designer/developer seat per month" license fee.