CryEngine no longer royalty free

They changed to go the 5% royalty route

https://www.cryengine.com/faq#faq-licensing

 

Don't think it will save them unfortunately.

 

I'm not surprised. They are a company after all. They need to make money. Anyone who thought they could choose the engine and sell games made with it for free forever was seriously fooling themselves.

 

Lumberyard is still royalty free so my guess is those who love to torture themselves with cryengine will probably switch over to that.

 

5% of revenues "at source" can be a significant amount when you consider that a store like Steam takes 30%, but your revenues for CryEngine are calculated as if Steam doesn't take anything.

They even want 5% of donations to you if those donations go to developing your game.

 

Sounds like they just copy pasted the Unreal model.

 

CryTek isn't alone here. Both Epic Games and Unity Technologies take similar approaches to donations.

 

Makes sense. Otherwise people would simply restructure their business as to avoid paying any royalties.

 

It's too much early, they are not ready before one or two years
Too much stuff is not finished, prone to changes and not recommended to use in production.
Entity system, schematycs, AI modules etc ...are all heavy wips, like some tools revamp.

Anyway i wish them success, more solutions indies have better it is , and Cryteck have some amazing features( Svogi, terrain blending, performance ... ).

 

Does Cryengine 5 need to bake lightmaps?

 

There is no lightmaps, GI is full realtime no baking.
But version 5.5 has new option "voxelisation baking and cache" , you can spend 5 minutes baking the level to voxels to get even more performance as Svogi will no more have to voxelize in real time all static meshes when rendering. It's a good compromise also and it should be usefull for consoles.

 

It will be great if Unity 2018 would have such GI with no baking needed.

 

This is the first time I hear Unity takes % from donations. Since when is this? Are you talking about the asset store content creators?

 

They just count donations towards the $100k amount when you need to upgrade to pro. Unity doesn't take a percentage though.

 

Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks.

 

At least Unity doesn't want a specific cut of your donations though. They just count it towards whether you fit in a certain licensing tier.

 

This bit of the license applies. Which includes donations.

And interestingly, they appear to have clarified the freelancer situation.

Which probably deserves its own thread. And means I now need to go back and do some checking in with various clients to figure out what their revenue is and the license implications for me.

 

Crytek should partner with Atari.

 

With some kind of crypto currency business model.

 

CryCoin. You'll cry when they fold and the coin is worthless.

 

Yeah with child porn links in the blockchain for good measure, because illegally trading is fun and everyone turns a blind eye...