Hello there. I'm not sure if you are all as interested as I am in indie games and mods, but I'm pretty sure you've all heard about the Unreal UDK. If you haven't, it's basically a free version of the Unreal Engine 3 that Epic released a few months back that allows indie developers to develop indie games without the huge costs of licensing the engine. Epic takes a cut if the game goes commercial, but other wise it's free. Shortly after Epic did this, Unity did the same by making their engine free to indie developers too. 
 
And then someone at Crytek said this when someone asked if Cryengine 3 will be available for modders: 
 
"Yes, but – to be frank – not as a mod. So far that’s what we’ve been offering for free, and it’s easy entry into the production environment. [But] we do want to make a standalone free platform that people can run independent of CryEngine that will also be up to speed with the latest engine. "   
 
Thoughts? I think that CryEngine 3 blows the Unity engine out of the water, and is a bit better than Unreal Engine 3, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would be easy to use so I'm not sure how high quality the games that come out of it will be. I still can't wait to see what people do with it though.

a) the Unity engine is for browser based games as far as I know. b)UE3 is mostly on its way out.c) As far as I know,  very few mainstream projects use CryEngine, secondly the part I'm concerned with is "standalone free platform"...and "independent of CryEngine".

" a) the Unity engine is for browser based games as far as I know. b)UE3 is mostly on its way out.c) As far as I know,  very few mainstream projects use CryEngine, secondly the part I'm concerned with is "standalone free platform"...and "independent of CryEngine". "

I don't see why they wouldn't.  It's not like you can release a game without being properly licensed so that isn't much of an issue.  The more people/students out there learning how to use your engine the better I guess, because companies will be more inclined to use that engine in future if their workforce is already familiar with it.
 
Unity (the free version at least) probably isn't that great compared to something like UDK - no 'Shadows' in the free version of Unity, etc. - but it remains free regardless of how you use it.  UDK is free to use but they take a 25% cut of any income over $5k iirc.  So not really free at all, but useful nonetheless.  
 
I think regardless of whether somebody uses Unity, UDK or (hypothetical) CryEngine, the game quality is going to be limited by what a small team can realistically achieve, rather than what the engines themselves are capable of.  It will be interesting to see if any major success stories come out of these small teams / individuals using the 'free' engines - I hope so.

A) that reminds me of Battlefield Heroes, B) UE4 has been in the works for a while now. Equally, I can't really think of any game that benefited from UE3 that wasn't attached to Epic in some sense. Army of Two being one of the few exceptions but still had other problems. I imagine once Gears 3 is out, they'll start talking about UE4 publicly which equally I think might be the beginning of the next console cycle. C) That would be great for anyone. Hopefully it integrates the feature that UE3 had where you could port levels to the PS3.

I don't think we're going to see a 'huge, epic FPS' coming out of the UDK 25% programme any time soon, at least not one that's any good.  It's just too much work for small teams / hobbyists / students to compete nowadays.  That and you can only make PC games with this option.  Something could succeed out of this, but I think it will be something closer to Torchlight, Plants vs. Zombies or Braid or something - not a game that requires the power of the Unreal Engine, and probably something that could have been made just as easily using Unity.
 
I don't think Epic particularly care about making a lot of money out of this, they just want to secure their position as the industry standard by having as many people as possible using their language, their engines etc. - the same reason everybody else makes student versions available for a fraction of the price.