Go behind the scenes at Massive Entertainment and discover the power of the Snowdrop engine; Massive's in-house answer to video game creation on the new generation of consoles. Snowdrop supports the philosophy of the studio to work better, not bigger, by giving content creators the freedom to experiment, prototype and truly unleash their creativity.

Epic’s goal is to put the engine within reach of everyone interested in building games and 3D content, from indies to large triple-A development teams, and Minecraft creators as well. For $19/month you can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development.

We’re working to build a company that succeeds when UE4 developers succeed. Anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users. If your game makes $1,000,000, then we make $50,000. We realize that’s a lot to ask, and that it would be a crazy proposition unless UE4 enables you to build way better games way more productively than otherwise!

Epic's UE biz change doesn't apply to PS4, Xbox One: "The console terms are custom-negotiated, it would depend on the scale"

As well as being optimized for next-generation consoles, the new CRYENGINE now includes Linux support for the first time. The full native port of CRYENGINE to Linux means developers will be able to use the engine's award-winning toolset for the creation of software on Linux Ubuntu 12.04 and newer versions of the operating system, adding to existing support for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation®4, Wii UTM, Xbox 360, PlayStation®3, iOS and Android.
Among the highlights of today's CRYENGINE update are:

Physically Based Shading – In contrast to traditional observational based shading seen in most real-time game engines, CRYENGINE's brand new Physically Based Shading model simulates the interaction between light and materials using real world physics.

Geometry Cache – Leveraging the power of today’s new hardware, CRYENGINE computes efficient, cache-based animations to realize the most complex simulations (cloth, explosions, fluid dynamics) normally only possible in offline rendering.

Character Technology –TheCRYENGINE update unites the most scalable, technically-advanced animation and rendering systems to deliver astonishingly realistic characters for games in real-time. Lifelike iris parallax mapping allows for a truly realistic eye representation, while new unified shaders for character shadows and hair add to the possibilities.

Image Based Lighting – Image Based Lighting brings lighting and render consistency to all materials. CRYENGINE’s shading model uses advanced BRDF values and normalization of specular highlights to render even the most complex lighting situations.

New features:
64-bit support
Geomerics Enlighten (This is the lighting engine used in Frostbite 2/3 if you're curious what is is. Works on PC/console/mobile.)
PowerVR raytraced lightmap previews
Overhauled audio system
Physx 3.3
Unity Cloud ad-sharing network
WebGL support

“We’ve got the most complex lighting in the industry now,” Helgason said.

Unity competes with rivals such as Crytek and Epic Games. Helgason said that Unity’s 3D graphics are more functional than Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, and new features will approach the quality of Unreal Engine 4.

“We think we can get to the point where we beat everything else out there,” Helgason said.