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CryEngine 3 vendor Crytek is planning the release of an indie-friendly SDK, the firm has told Develop.
Crytek co-founder Anvi Yerli said his firm already “has a business model in mind” for the CryEngine software development kit.
“It will be extremely user-friendly,” he said.
“The barriers for entry will be very low, and perhaps [it will be distributed] for free”, he added.
Yerli said he was aware the strategy will naturally be compared to Epic Games’ own UDK – a high-end game engine that is freely available for developers and hobbyists to download.
“Of course this [the CryEngine SDK] will be compared to UDK and Unity and so on, but we think this sort of competition is very good for the community.”
Yerli held back on discussing details of the dev kit. Its revenue model, and available platform, is a matter of speculation.
Epic Games’ own UDK takes 25 per cent of wholesale revenues from commercial games built on the engine. The tech can be used to make games across a variety of platforms, from PC to smartphone.
Asked about Crytek’s plan for mobile, Yerli said “the use of CryEngine outside of core games makes a lot of sense to us and we are very interested”.
“We actually have some developers going towards mobile and online for web and browser games,” he added.
“From our point of view, our technology is pretty far advanced and we want to see high-end content attached to our technology. Mobile and web projects, however, are still strategically very important to Crytek.
“The mobile platforms are enhancing very much from a technological perspective, and if you look at the mobile evolution from a hardware side it actually seems like modern console tech will be available on mobiles in just a couple of years from now.
“We have been slow in the mobile space, and slow in the browser space, but what we will deliver will be innovative.”
