CryENGINE 3 SDK release free of charge; reaches 100k downloads in 5 days
Recently Crytek GmbH, the creators of the FarCry and Crysis games have released the SDK for their latest engine CryENGINE 3. The engine is in use in their game Crysis 2.
The SDK includes a number of great features, including a “What you see is what you play” (WYSIWYP) tool that allows game designers great creative control over the creation of game content. With the SDK developers can create entire games that run on CryENGINE 3, instead of just mods.
Furthermore this SDK has been released for free, and anyone can download it from their website, and build a game using it. However the terms of the free licence only allow developers to create games or other software using the SDK for free for non-commercial projects.
For commercial projects Crytek has a new licence model, wherein game developers can use legally the SDK for their commercial project by paying 20% of their revenue to Crytek.
In the few days it has been since the launch of this free SDK, there have already been over 100,000 downloads, showing that there is great interest for creating new games using this engine. Hopefully in the near future will will see a number of Indie games developed using this engine.
You can download the SDK, which is under 1GB, from the Crytek developer website from here.