Have you seen the pay to be a beta tester bundle yet?
Hmmm, a bit early for April Fools...

I wonder if this has anything to do with Amazon's licensing of Cryengine for their free Lumberyard engine..
Might be a desperate effort to get people to use the original (which as far as I understand still requires some kind of royalty payments for commercial games)

Anyway, if I didn't think there would be a hell of load of restrictions on what you could actually do with any of it I might be tempted, but as catpower mentioned I'm sure there will be clauses and limitations to the use of the assets (like only in free games or only games made with Cryengine or something)

Maximum boner

Wow, if selling prototypes (not demos) wasn't bad enough! they just "raised" the bar... HB is going downhill.

Most people don't get what this pack is really useful for.
Excellent bundle for someone at the prototyping stage of a game; a lot cheaper than buying the assets you need separately or getting good artists involved at a very early design/greenlight phase.
Gameplay is also better judged by 3rd parties before production who need to see something more convincing rather than the programmer/designer made blobs and models...
Once production ramps up, assets can be replaced with your own game specific ones from your own artists.

It is also only useful if you consider CryEngine at all, evaluating whether its suitable for your current project.

Of course the bundle is a complete waste of money and time for anyone else; either no use whatsoever, or already way too much invested into the ecosystem of a different engine such as Unreal or Unity.

I can't quote myself but looks like I was right about the license terms of the assets. According to the official twitter account:

https://twitter.com/cryengine/status/709874255010267136
"the assets are tied to CRYENGINE."

But how are they going to squeeze in next to all the Gamemaker ones?

Use manual quotes. quote_23 is the one you mean I believe.

That's expected - a package like this can save a lot of money if you happen to prototype a few ideas and evaluate CryEngine.
It's essentially a starter pack for CE prototyping and essentially a "gateway drug" luring developers to try CE.
Chances are, if you like what you get during protoyping the full production will use CE as well.

If for any reason CE does not suit your needs paying a little pocket money was not a big loss - especially compared to the Unity Pro prices, and 6 figure sum for getting source code access to Unity, which is needed for projects that require decent performance with more complex logic and scenes.
It's also very cheap compared to say even Maya LT subscription; less than a month worth of payment.

So yes, it can be very tempting if you want a high performance engine with source code access - otherwise Unity is a better choice.
With C# scripting they are clearly aiming at getting Unity devs too, but I have a feeling that the barrier to entry is a bit high even at C# level for many Unity devs.

I have this great idea for a Campfire game. Soon on Greenlight

That's not true though. The Madison Pike assets (I wish I knew who that was; google found nothing) are free to use with any engine.

I only got the free campfire for now, to see what it contains, and it's a hodgepodge of asset formats: .ma, .mb, .fbx, .max files (some objects have .ma, some .fbx + .max) and .psd or .tga for textures.

Yup, I've vaguely read it on gamedev reddit and that's why for a released game (be it free or commercial), aware devs should avoid those kind of assets without proper licenses infos. Kind of amateurish for both Humble and Crytek to have skipped on the legal matters. :(

Under the link you posted, someone replied highlighting where the licence text appears to contradict it. Very confusing.

BTW, Lumberyard (the Amazon game engine based on CryEngine) has just been updated:

- Beginning of mobile support (very restricted hardware ATM)
- Component entity system (works like in Unity I suppose)
- Substance integration
- FBX importer
- Twitch integration: in-game vote function (just like I predicted)

Needless to say that between vanilla CryEngine and Lumberyard, the latter shows more vitality to increase its engine adoption so it would be a waste of time to get into CE through this bundle...

The problem with lumberyard is the licence: all MP code must be tied to AWS and it's a paid service.
That means MP won't work with GOG Galaxy - on the positive side it will work the same for both Steam and GOG users, provided that GOG even accepts a game that is not locked into Galaxy for MP... a clarification would be nice from GOG employees on this matter.

I'm not sure what you mean. There's a license that specifically says these assets can be used with any game engine. I'm sure for many that's part of the draw of the bundle.