No documentation,
barely any tutorials,
no source,
terrible, terrible forums,
over 200 sounds? Have to license a different sound engine for $700,
stop subscribing and lose all access unlike UE4
Probably the worst pipeline I've ever seen for a game editor, you have to use 3ds max and nothing else
I can probably write more if you want
I agree, but I think some of those points only applied to indie devs. As far as I know (all a bit based on hearsay), those who subscribed to the paid version of CryEngine could get access to its full source code and support - of course at a pretty hefty fee. That was under their old licensing model though, I'm not really well aware of their new one.
Generally speaking, completely agree to your points though. I used to play around with the indie CryEngine for a bit, and it was a horrible experience.
- The dev kit was completely geared towards FPS games. When creating a new project, you literally started out dropping into the world in first person view with a weapon in your hand. So when aiming to create another genre, not only did you have to create all necessary code for that specific genre yourself, but first you had to remove all unnecessary FPS features by hand first. Which wasn't easy at all, see the next point...
- You really can't stress enough how bad the documentation really was. When trying to dig into the available parts of the C++ source, it was basically pure trial and error to find the right methods / code location you were looking for. And good luck with that, as you can imagine, there was a LOT of source code to search through.
- The community was relatively small and mostly inexperienced. If you had any questions or issues, you were usually on your own, most questions remained unanswered. If anything, most questions were answered by further comments such as "oh yea I'd really like to know this, too".
Too bad actually, CryEngine (potentially) has incredible visual fidelity, and those guys really knew how to push technical boundaries. But for indie devs or even smaller commercial teams, I just don't see any reasonable justification in choosing CryEngine over Unity or UDK.