Having released its most recent Unreal development kit free to the public, and already having been downloading over 50,000 times, Epic Games has been working with over 100 select campuses to get the material integrated into the academic realm. Not to be out-philanthropized, the minds at Crytek have now made available the entirety of their CryENGINE 3 for free to colleges across the country.
Carl Jones, Director of Global Business Development – CryENGINE commented: “Crytek has always been a strong supporter of education – as evidenced by our commitment for many years to share CryENGINE tools with universities. We are continuing that commitment now by releasing the brand new CryENGINE 3 tools to any university in the world, for free! Here at Crytek, we work hard to enable all our licensees to achieve their vision with CryENGINE 3, so we aren’t considering this Educational SDK as a product we ‘fire and forget’ – we will be looking for strong educational partners to work together with Crytek in the future – and we will soon be announcing exciting programmes for students working with CryENGINE 3.”
“Students and educators using the engine will become part of our larger CryENGINE community, so they can create their own innovations and train to become the developers of the future,” added Ury Zhilinsky, R&D Manager at Crytek. “With the CryENGINE 3 Educational SDK, the same cutting-edge technology that the world’s best developers are using now in games, movies and simulations will now be in the hands of the next generation of creators and engineers.”
Think this could be the first step to game design becoming a fully legitimate major? Or do you think Crytek and Epic are just wasting their time? Give us your thoughts in the space below!
I am more excited to see what comes out of the CryENGINE 3, since it is new, and the Unreal Engine 3 has been around for a long time. The CryEngine 3 has impressive tech, that includes great graphics and physics to boot, besides, it doesn’t make everything look like wet plastic as the Unreal Engine 3 does.