Is anyone working on a commercial indy title with Cryengine 3, and if so why?
I ask why not because the engine isn't spectacular. I ask why because after a full year of being released, Crytek apparently has refused to provide a public explanation behind the indie license. There are literally dozens of teams that are complaining about not receiving responses from the licensing submission form, and there are no clear policies about what the process is and what the options are.
The attitude, whether intentional or not, smacks of indifference and arrogance on the part of the company. I have read of a few teams that claim they have received NDAs and clear guidelines, but the problem is that none of it is public.
So question to people in the know, if there are any here. What is going on with this company and their indie dev strategy? Why do they continue to claim the licensing terms for indies are being finalized and will be released when complete? This just doesn't pass the smell test after a full year.
And why would anyone put their hard work into learning the engine, buying training videos and books, and investing thousands of hours into building an indie title, only to find out that there's no response at the other end of the line when you go to acquire permission to release it?
The attitude, whether intentional or not, smacks of indifference and arrogance on the part of the company. I have read of a few teams that claim they have received NDAs and clear guidelines, but the problem is that none of it is public.
So question to people in the know, if there are any here. What is going on with this company and their indie dev strategy? Why do they continue to claim the licensing terms for indies are being finalized and will be released when complete? This just doesn't pass the smell test after a full year.
And why would anyone put their hard work into learning the engine, buying training videos and books, and investing thousands of hours into building an indie title, only to find out that there's no response at the other end of the line when you go to acquire permission to release it?
Replies
Sounds shady what you speak of.
XionXinX, the problem is that there are a few teams out there that after a full year have already completed their title and want to publish it, only to be ignored by Crytek.
It's truly bizarre. It doesn't help that the indie gaming press and blog scene isn't holding them accountable. I see interviews with their public facing employees, and posts about their indie license, but not a single soul has dared to challenge them on this very vague policy.
I would argue that the lack of seriousness surrounding their SDK, and by seriousness, I mean actual small studios working on titles, is directly a result of this vapor license.
That's really a shame in the end. As of this date, there has to my knowledge not been a single indie dev release using Cryengine 3, and few people are calling them out on this.
First of all, is your friend working with an indie license of their engine, or a regular commercial license? This is a big point of clarification.
If the former, then with respect, your explanation doesn't hold. Consider this, if it is true that they only want qualified teams working on *indie* games, then why don't they issue a statement to the community that says exactly that? They have not, and therefore they allow many teams that are earnestly working on titles, and quite legitimately talented, to waste thousand of hours and much of their small supply of funds, only to have no chance of profiting from their work using the Cryengine 3 SDK.
So again, with respect, but your explanation simply doesn't hold. The chief complaint being leveled against the company is their PR and communications as it relates to the indie license. They are releasing this technology with vague and arguably misleading statements about indie commercial licenses. They themselves profit from the publicity, but at the expense of individuals and tiny studio companies.
It's simply wrong.
LOL!! Awesome, dude. Great minds think alike LOL!
Can you name any projects? (I'd be interested personally)
Usually if you have a game at a point, where its showable or you have a proven track record you should have no problem getting in touch. I don't know how exactly the evaluation system works (as I'm not in licensing), but I'd consider it to be similar to job applications, where you have to filter through thousands of non-sense messages to find a gem. Maybe you can show your project here and get some attention to it?
secondly, they don't provide a way to demonstrate what you're working on. I think many have concluded that Crytek has shammed the industry. It's rather embarrassing for the gaming media to not have called them on it by now.
Lets not descend into conspiracy theories. The fact is that crydev is not MyCryENGINE.com
Make a game that doesnt suck with cryengine or avoid it all together and use udk. Its your choice.
There's no conspiracy. It's a single company and a negligent media. Both act on their own. Nobody suggested otherwise. To point out the media's failure is not to point to conspiracy, but rather to laziness.
Make a game that doesn't suck? With respect, that's no way to run a business. Making a game that doesn't suck costs time and money, even for indies. To do so with an engine that has absolutely no evidence of ever being allowed for commercial use would be foolish to say the last.
End of discussion.
lol.
Do you want to have a pro or casual engine, a commercial or indie engine ? CE is a very good engine, the only available engine which is on the level of UDK.
But the problem is, that it is still a young engine compared to other engines, and they need to place their engine as pro-engine. Giving away indie licenses too early could result in a casual/indie engine image which would be the death of it (you can't make enough money with it to keep up, compare it to torque engine).
UDK has kind of a monopoly, is very matured and has an excellent list of reference game. Nobody would doubt, that UDK is not absolutly pro, moving their engine into the indie space is not because of being nice, it is to thrust the other engines out of the market. This was most likely the reason, that CE3 has more or less released an indie license, because they were forced to do so. The market is getting thinner, many larger publishers uses other excellent engine for inhouse projects (id tech, frostbite) and making money with indie projects is hard.
Except that e-freak is from Crytek. So he probably knows about the stuff you're talking about. Seems unlikely that there would be some back-dealings here.
That they've "shammed" the industry is entirely subjective. You're getting a free version of their engine. And they made it clear that if you demonstrate your project, they'll work with you to get you a license.
I don't believe it's in their interest to NOT make money.
I don't know if that's the most up-to-date information, but it should give you a good idea.
Apart from that: Make a good portfolio for your game and send an e-Mail to Crytek. As an example look at Chris Roberts newest game which just got Crowdfunded and is working on CryEngine
There is no way that I'm aware of that you can show your in progress game to Crytek. They don't seem to be responding to anyone's communication. Not even a rejection letter. It's the height of unprofessionalism.
Chris Roberts? He is a legend in gaming, that's not a useful comparison.
I'm not sure that Crytek has to worry about their engine being perceived as amateurish. Clearly their 1st party titles remove that possibility. They probably should worry instead about their global business reputation.
chill out dude.
Code is a different story. Although cryengine 3 uses c++ which the next unreal engine 4 also uses. I would hope you can still somewhat transfer that code if UE4 ever comes in UDK form.
I agree with the discouragement of using the engine for a long time just to realize you can't get a license, but honestly if you have a good enough team or showcase and would actually benefit from having a license, then you would probably be given one if you contacted them and showed them enough quality art / ui / package.
I'm really mad just because I can't use kickstarter until I show them my project and hope to get a private license. I didn't want to release any concepts / material before I was ready to unveil it all at once.
Its going to be very useful to you to use cryengine for some time to get familiar with it and what its capable of and then keep that newfound knowledge in your brain for reference at a later time. In this time you should be at least able to complete a "level". And this is all you need to sell a game, really. One good level. Remember Counterstrike for example boils down to Dust.
I hope we can agree on this
Reply: They replied me saying they are working on some kind of a licence
"In case you are interested in commercial usage, we will also be launching licensing options for Free CryENGINE SDK game projects very soon, which will be based on a 20% royalty for Crytek. If you use the Free SDK and are enquiring after our cost-free, royalty-only license to commercialize an entertainment game built with CryENGINE, we will soon activate this model, please bear with us while we prepare for this - information will be published on www.crydev.net and www.mycryengine.com."
When they said "we will soon activate this model" I think it is a good news
You agree or i am wrong tell me please
CryEngine3 is actually more advanced than the UDK while being younger. Unreal Engine 4 will have the same tech that Crytek had when they released Crysis 2 a couple of years ago. It really depends on your preference and how many features you are looking for. Unreal Engine 3 is very dated and it shows in every game that is released with it's tech. Personally I would pick Unity over some of the engines that are out there because is is shipped with it's own Scripting Editor which makes things easier. The only problem with Unity is the limitation features if you are using the free version. But if I was to pick an engine to work with it would probably be the UDK and Unreal Engine 3, not just because of the features, but the fact that Epic Games is veteran company in business. Crytek is supported by a certain failing EA Games.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/24/ea-partners-facing-closure.aspx
Crytek is Indie. Yeah, a Company that owns several studios it's own R&D department can still be indie.
EA have NOTHING to do with Crytek. They were only in arrgment by EA PArtners Program for Crysis series.
DICE is making technology that is/will be used by most internal EA developers.
After Tencent aquiring 49% of Epic Games I would not call Epic indie so much like before Tencent.
It really depends on what are you looking at.
There are some very impressive parts in CryEngine, and some that are Far Cry (pun intended) from being advanced and date back to CryEngine1...
Material Editor and shader system are utterly outdated. You are stuck with Crytek way. Forgot to create custom shaders or at least customize the provided ones.
Yes the provided shaders are cool and nice. But if you need very specific functionality build on top of them. Well though luck... You can forgot about things like one texture enviroment. Not gonna happen in CryEngine3.
Terrain is another. It haven't seen any imrpvoemnts since CryEngine1 (!!).
Still, very fast iteration times makes CryEngine3 to be very desirable if you can get around some limitations.
Not to mention that you can integrate some third party tech into CryEngine 3 without code access (it's very hacked but hey you can!), like Shourd Cloth Sim (it's on Crydev).
I agree with that, with next gen coming out UE4 is sure to dominate professional markets and indie markets alike. I am one of the many Indie's anticipating the release of UDK4, I keep watching the feature walk-through each time I load my web browser up :P
It would like claming that Epic is doomed because Microfost closing Microsoft Game Studios after publishing Gears Of War.
Our team of 4 people was working on a game in CryENGINE3 FreeSDK for a few months ... my advice to indies considering Crytek would be not to bother unless you plan to use the SDK as a quick proof of concept only. After a significant amount of time invested in using their technology, we were unable to receive a response to simple licensing inquiries. Sure, we registered and signed the NDA and got a boiler plate response about how the indie licensing would be released "soon", but that's all that ever came of it. To be clear, we are not some roughshod group of basement dwellers ... we have a company and a product and funding to afford middleware and deliver said product to a commercial market. And yet we were unable to secure any type of license, or even a response about possible options from Crytek. Hmmmmm.
It definitely rubs me the wrong way that almost all I see when researching Crytek's indie licensing is positive press straight from the PR factory. It's hard not to feel like the entire indie license was a way to make waves in the media and everyone ate it up. Then again, I probably sound jaded because I definitely had a poor experience.
FYI we tried out Unity for a bit and then ended up using Ogre and assembling our own subsystems for sound/physics/etc. Good luck to all the indies out there ... and beware of investing significant time in CryENGINE without securing license arrangements first