CryEngine 3 costs $1.2 million to license

According to a software company working on a commercial project with the CryEngine 3, the engine costs $1.2 million to license.

[NovusTerminus]

O.o

That seems really steep for the price...

[ATi_Elite]

Your gonna make that back easily!

Sure a little tough for Indie studios but some of the mid and corporate level studios should have no problem paying up!

Also CryEngine 3 drastically cuts Dev time across multi-plat games so in turn more studios should use it for faster Development of games.

[PSVITAlitysensor]

Yeah, its just 1.2 million. Not a big deal for global companies who will make billions from games running on CryEngine 3.

[Grap]

indie studios more important than big company.. most of the big studios use engine of their own creation.

[neoandrew]

Grap

Indie studios will use UDK or CRYENGINE 3 SDK, they are much cheaper.

[morganfell]

This is the first place where Crytek fails. Draconian uniformity.

Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can.

Simply one of the best guys in the industry. You get the same license and support, regardless of your project, but the price is adapted to your studio.

The second place Crytek fails is they have the worst support...ever. You will get assistance from other developers on the dev forum before someone from Crytek finally gets around to fielding your inquiry. They have no system of tracking requests. A request on the closed dev forum, restricted to licensees, can set for two weeks until you figure it out yourself or some other developer sees it and says, "Hey, this worked for us." Atrocious customer service.

On the other hand, Epic has the greatest team for handling issues I have ever seen. When something pops up it is assigned a tracker and then placed into the hopper with a specific person tracking and handling your problem. It gets fixed.

[Gaming101]

To know whether this is actually steep just for the license, you would have to compare it with other licensing fees ie. Frostbite 2, Unreal 3 etc.

[kaveti6616]

"Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can."

I didn't know that.

I thought it was a flat 500k rate, which I think is exceptional considering how great flexible Unreal Engine 3 is. Cryengine 3 is phenomenal as well, but no indie developer really needs it or could afford it at that price.

[BattleAxe]

I prefer the Phire Engine.

[CoD511]

Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)

@morganfell

[CoD511]

Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)

@morganfell

[dantesparda]

@neoandrew

Whats the difference between a UDK or SDk or the 1.2million one? I never knew it worked like that. And big ups to Morganfell for explaining the way customer service works with these companies and actually making it clear to understand. I never knew that either, thanks

[Pokemon_Master]

Its very very expensive and should just show you how expensive next gen is going to be when only 2 devs are making games on consoles.

[OhMyGandhi]

that certainly is quite frightening to think about.

I have a feeling that new I.P's are going to be more and more of a risk as production values sky rocket.

Thank God for Xbox Live's indie crowd. Only costs 100 bucks to put a game on XBL using XNA. :)

[vortis]

No, no, no.

Licensing fees for AAA engines are always high.

Epic uses the UDK for indie devs and there will be a UE4 version of the UDK after it releases so you can build high quality games without paying a dime.

There are also engines like Outerra and Unity which are also indie-dev friendly.

The price above is for commercial use from multi-billion dollar corporations. $1.2 for them is like penny and dime chump change.

Next-gen games SHOULD NOT have higher dev costs with all the cost-effective tools being released to cut down on both gameplay mechanics, infrastructure stability and asset management.

Pubs will no doubt use this kind of misinformation to get people to believe all game development is rising like a mofo and will charge you an arm and a leg because they can (sort of like what Capcom is doing brainwashing people into thinking disc-locked content had to be done otherwise they wouldn't make any money).

[Persistantthug]

.

[wicko]

It won't cost that much for an indie developer. Also 1.2mil is not realy expensive for an engine for a larger studio, and is in line with most engines (unreal 3 included)

[tmoss726]

Unreal 3 costs a little less than that.

[TacoTaru]

$1.2 Million probably covers the cost of 7-8 good software engineers for a years time. Considering that the alternative of do-it-yourself would also cost a bunch of testing time, the engine is definitely worth it.

[Blaze929]

well looks like another gen of Unreal Engine games >_>

[Intentions]

Oh geeze... Wonder how much the Unreal engine cost then.

[Pandamobile]

I think I heard somewhere around $300,000 for a commercial license.

[vishant101]

that's why it was so prevalent this gen it was cheaper to license then other engines and still provided great graphics

[Rearden]

Yes, it's cheaper, but you have to pay royalties to Epic if you use the UnrealEngine, you don't have to pay royalties if you use the CryEngine 3.

[Pandamobile]

Pretty sure the royalties are for the free version of UE3. Both UE3 and CE3 have a free indie SDK that allows small companies to use the high end tools without having to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars up front.

[neoandrew]

Just BS man, SOURCE ?

There was some time ago a news, is was about 1 mln $ to license unreal engine.

[Pokemon_Master]

probably close

[vortis]

Free if you use the UDK.

[Kakkoii]

No it's not. Just because you can download UDK and work with stuff in it, doesn't make it free. You can download CE3 for free as well and develop in it without paying.

What costs money is to be allowed to PUBLISH a game that has been made with it. You have to pay a licensing fee to EPIC, to use they engine in a commercial game, same goes with CE3.

[Surfaced]

Yikes... now I understand why it hasn't been so popular outside of Crytek.

[MySwordIsHeavenly]

I imagine it cost Crytek multi-millions to make it.

[BattleTorn]

I'm obviously not familiar with production costs, but that would appear to be a fairly steep price.

Which is too bad, cause game in CryEngine 3 always look so nice!

[Pintheshadows]

I was about to say "woah, that's crazy", but I suppose when you consider the cost of game development these days and the profit that can be involved it isn't that bad.

In anycase developers would have to spend money if they wanted to create an in house engine to this spec anyway. Probably more than 1.2 mil as well.

As someone above stated, I bet it cost Crytek a lot more to develop it.

[vortis]

A very sound observation there.

And you're right, it cost Guerrilla Games upward of $60 to design their engine and game from scratch (KillZone 2). Some studios do this because they have specific goals that they want the engine to accomplish.

But $1.2 million for a commercial use is a good price for an AAA title given that like BF3, ME3 or COD, these games make hundreds of millions in sales revenue.

[neogeo]

Great idea! Just put all the so called downloadable content already on the disk and make everyone pay extra day 2 after already buying the game and shelling out $60. Then we can afford cry engine:)

[CrzyFooL]

It all depends on the deal. Licenses can be anything from straight royalty to millions. This story is teh bullshit.

[Bounkass]

Nobody cares. As long as it works for the gamers.

[neoandrew]

BUT look at the possibilities.

Indie studios or small teams can use CRYENGINE 3 SDK at much lower cost.

The commercial license is for professional big studios/companies.

[Persistantthug]

is the big studios & big publishers who can easily afford this, they already have their own engines.

EA for example is forcing most of its developers who use Unreal to start using FROSTBYTE 2.0

[neoandrew]

EA also distribute crysis 2, there is no correlation here.

But anyone can buy a license.

[CanadianTurtle]

If Activision bought this, they would abuse it annually.

[MRHARDON]

"If Activision bought this, they would abuse it annually."

They would abuse the engine? hmm that means they would be taking advantage of it and max it to its full power?

[RevXM]

I think turtle meant it like its going to be touted and slapped on every Activision game cover as an sales argument.

But a good engine wont help if the dev isnt up to make the game running smooth or care to make and balance the visuals.

For instance there is a lot of UE games that looks like crap. and same can be true for a game on any other engine.

I can see 10 new Guitar heros *RUNNING OF THE CRY ENGINE 3!!!!*

Meanwhile on the interwebs
*OH YEAH UBER SICK GRAPHICS ALL ABOARD THE HYPE TRAIN! CHOO CHOO!*

Later they realize
*....Oh no wait They were to lazy to really care and put effort in it.*
Still looks like ass.

[BuffMordecai]

Most Unreal Engine games on console look and play like ass. Only Batman and Gears have impressed me by the use of that engine. This gen, Cryengine 3 looks a whole lot better. Its a shame that the engine had to come out late in this generation of consoles and cost higher that its competitor, a lot of games could have benefited from the used of of the Cryengine. At least by the looks of it, Unreal Engine is going to bring it next gen.

[tmoss726]

The Mass Effect series was Unreal 3.

[raytraceme]

you are not helping yourself there. Mass effect has shitty graphics and textures. On the ps3 it can't even maintain 30 fps and on the pc the game looks like crap.

Arkham city I was most impressed by with its scale and graphics. On the pc arkham city is one of the best looking game I have played so far and it was using ue3 congrats to those developers.

[STONEY4]

Feelings have been hurt.

http://img254.imageshack.us...

[Perjoss]

Are you high? Mass Effect 1 (yes even on 360) still looks great, not even mentioning ME2 and 3.

[Optical_Matrix]

Not sure why you've got disagree's because I agree. Gears 3 and Arkham City are the only really impressive UE3 games I've seen on consoles this generation. Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 on consoles impressed me far more. The lighting and physics involved, especially Frostbites ability to aid the rendering of such inctricate destruction on 6-7 year old hardware is more impressive than anything UE3 has done.

Only thing that impresses me about that engine is its ease of use across a wide variety of games/genre's because I know that in some cases, certain engines just don't go with certain genre's.

@tmss726...Mass Effect looks horrible on consoles. In fact, it's a bland looking game across the board.

[Genecalypse]

Makes sense, how many games actually license it? Not many thats for sure

[NobleRed]

Craptivision should aquire the Cry Engine 3. So finally the next Call Of Duty game wouldn't look like crap like always.

[FinaLXiii]

it would play like 30 fps crap.

[annus]

on consoles...

[gtxgamer2]

So if indie developers wanted to license their game theyd have to pay 1.2 mill?

[Kakkoii]

Unlikely. It only supposedly cost 1.2m for this specific developer. Crytek and Epic will usually do a consultation with you, and assess how much the licensing fee should be for your project. Whether it's a AAA blockbuster game, or just some small indie game that's not going to make massive profit.

[tachy0n]

just FYI the cryengine has one of the world's most expensive water renderings out there

[Awesome_Gamer]

Not a big deal for the big companies that want it.. they will make more profit anways

[BaconBits]

I am surprised it is not a base fee plus profit share. Seems like that would be the best way to support it and push creativity.

[TBONEJF]

Sound like chump change to me.

[Drainage]

which is why every one and their dog is making safe bets FPS/TPS cover system games that are mostly garbo. Games are too expensive to be creative. Make a sequel and get rich , guaranteed money so just half ass it. Then we can say "going back to our roots for part 3"" cough gears, resistance, socom ETC..

[Pana]

How much is UE3 in Comparison?

[Bakkies]

In the olden days, licensing the UE2 cost about $750k. These days, if it is a big budget game, then you can negotiate with epic. If would guess it would be between $500k and $1mil, but I have no evidence to back that number up.

[OpiZA]

That doesn't seem too high, a crap load less than making your own engine I presume?

[theeg]

I'd take a game made on cryengine 3 over unreal 3 any day of the week, so would modt people i'd guess.

that said, unreal 4 is already a reality, so we'll have to see.......

[DJ]

The price is high but the demonstration videos are absolutely amazing. You can literally set up a level in an hour. I've used Unity, and it's an Indie studio's best bet. My programmers were able to work with it fairly easily, though Android development is a PAIN.

If I could, I'd use CryEngine. But 1.2 million is a big leap of faith. It's up to CryTek to make the engine as attractive as possible. I've looked up Frostbite 2, but the info on that engine is very obscure since EA wants to keep the engine to itself (and rightly so).

[Bladesfist]

eww but cryengine uses lua, I prefer unitys choice of languages and so I use Unity. They are also free and just gave away free licenses for iphone and android.