Along with Unreal and Unity, CRYENGINE is one of the most powerful video game development engines that we can find on the market. This is the engine that is under the hood of great titles such as the Crysis saga, Kingdom Come Deliverance or Ryse: Son of Rome, among others. Although it was originally a commercial engine, today anyone can take advantage of its potential and make the most of the engine to create games on their own. However, how much does it cost us to develop a game with it?
Downloading the CRYENGINE engine is free
Years ago, to use this video game development engine it was necessary to pay a fee of 9.99 euros per month. A price that everyone could pay, as long as it was dedicated to game development. By paying this subscription, the user was already exempt from all kinds of royalties and rights, and 100% of the benefits ended up in his hands.
But those responsible for the engine realized that their rivals were targeting different business models. And they decided to change it with the release of version 5 of this engine. Thus, we can currently download and use CRYENGINE completely free of charge , without having to pay anything to download or use it. What’s more, it’s a 100% open source engine, and we can find this code on GitHub .
To start using this engine, the first thing is to be a Windows user. From there, we download the launcher, and from it we can download the version of the engine that we want to use. In the process we can also choose the plugins, or dependencies, that we want to install, as well as the IDE that we are going to use to code.
Beware of royalities
Once the game is developed and published is when the costs start. The first $5,000 of revenue is royalty-free. But, from there, we will have to pay 5% of the total gross income of the game . These revenues are calculated based on the revenue generated on the platform. That is, if a game generates 100,000 euros in sales, and we only receive 70% of it on Steam (for example), we will still have to pay 5% of the 100,000 euros.
Of course, there are always exceptions, aside from the $5,000 per year, per game, already mentioned:
- Remuneration for service and work for hire without any participation in the gross income (when we make a game for others).
- Gross revenue generated on Crytek’s CRYENGINE Marketplace.
- Gross revenue from gaming merchandise.
- Prizes awarded by the game (for example, the GOTY).
- Donations not used for the development of the game.
- If we have paid in advance.
If we make video tutorials to teach programming with this engine, we will not have to pay royalties for the income generated by that course either. Just as we will not have to pay if we develop non-profit games, or for educational purposes.
