Next-gen technology will now be in the hands of the general public, due to two surprise announcements from leading game engine manufacturers. At the Game Developers Conference 2014 yesterday, founder of Epic Games Tim Sweeney announced that the Unreal Engine 4 will be available to the public for a subscription fee of $19 a month.
“With Unreal Engine 4 we’re looking to wipe the slate completely clean. Everyone who subscribed to the engine gets access to the complete C++ code.” says Sweeney during the conference. Subscribers will then be able to ship games for PC, Mac, iOS and Android with a 5% of gross revenue royalty fee. This is a bold step for the company, as it now allows the game engine that was popular amongst game developers to be widely used by even more creative outlets, to produce some very interesting projects. Epic Games has made the Unreal Engine 4 available today.
But it doesn’t end there. Crytek, the studio behind the original Far Cry and the Crysis series, also announced that they will be making the CryEngine available to the public, for a $9.90 per month subscription fee. It will be available in May and it will not affect the free, non-commercial software development kit offered by Crytek. They also noted that the engine as a service version of the CryEngine will be ‘royalty free’ and will feature Linux support.
This is some very interesting news and it may mark the first step for more companies making their engines available for public use. We’ve already seen what the CryEngine can do in Crytek’s own games and it’s also being used in the upcoming 4 player co-op shooter Evolve. The Unreal Engine has also already proven itself through its usage in various previous gen titles and the Infiltrator real-time demo shows the power of its newest iteration. What do you think of this news? Would you like to see more developers make their engines available?