CryEngine became available on Steam

As part of the EaaS (Engine as a Service) revolution, a new event took place among the game engines: CryEngine appeared on Steam and is available as a subscription for 1, 3, and 6 months. The engine includes all the latest updates used by the developers of Ryse: Son of Rome and the Crysis series.

Here are just the expected miracle did not happen. No source code in the bundle is still shipped as before. Moreover, after the expiration of your subscription, you can not even use the engine - when you start it, you will see a screen with a DRM login. Ultimately, we are dealing with the same FreeSDK that was available before - only now also for a monthly fee.

At a second glance, another unpleasant discovery comes: the Wwise sound engine included in CryEngine also requires licensing if you use more than 200 sounds in your project. A license for it will cost you $ 750 for one platform per year, and this is in addition to the subscription to CryEngine.
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What happened to the free version of the SDK available on the site? She is dead. Still available, but no longer supported and will not be updated. Maybe someone will find a positive side to this: if in the past you had to pay 20% of sales, now you will not owe Crytek anything other than a monthly fee. On the other hand, for everyone who wants to “just dig deeper” with the engine, difficult times are coming - no plans to support the free version of Crytek have been voiced.

In a discussion on Reddit, a game programmer working in Epic (Crytek’s direct competitor for engines) directly suggests using UE4 , which not only has a large list of video tutorials updated every day, but also allows you to cancel a subscription with a $ 19 / month fee whenever you want and continue to use the engine further; If you want to receive updates, it will be enough to renew your subscription. And yes - this behavior is officially encouraged by the authors of the engine. For those developers at UE4, who will exceed the $ 12,000 / year income level, another 5% of royalties are added, but for many developers this is not so important.

Steam