Crytek Announces "EaaS" For Indie Game Developers

The latest exciting announcement for gamers and game developers out of this week's GDC is word of Crytek starting an "Engine-as-a-Service" program.

Crytek's Engine-as-a-Service program will allow indie game developers to use CryEngine's cutting-edge features at a monthly fee of $9.90 USD per user per month and without any royalty fees. This monthly fee is lower than the just announced program by Epic Games where Unreal Engine 4 is available for $19 per month to developers. While Crytek has a lower monthly fee and doesn't take any royalty fees, their EaaS access doesn't appear to be at source level. Epic's Unreal Engine 4 allows game developers complete access to the code-base. Also available from Crytek will be a free SDK for all-in-one game development that can be used for non-commercial game development.

Making Crytek's announcement today exciting is that Crytek is finally publicly acknowledging and supporting CryEngine on Linux. I'll have more details tomorrow and Friday when I'm out in San Francisco at the Game Developer's Conference, but for now you can read the CryEngine.com announcement.