After four years, we will retire CRYENGINE Answers on December 1st to focus on our other community spaces.

The way we use community spaces is changing. Over the past four years, we have endeavored to provide our CRYENGINE Developer community with useful tools that give you the resources you need to make your games and projects a reality. Community spaces are an essential part of those surrounding services. Providing areas where you can chat with other developers pick up tips and tricks, ask questions, and find help for issues you might encounter is really important. CRYENGINE Answers provided such a space, alongside the CRYENGINE.com forum.

But a lot has happened over the last four years. We are always analyzing data about how our services are used to improve what we do and plan for the future. Over time we have found that more and more people are moving away from static online spaces. Since the launch of our official CRYENGINE Discord Server, we have seen people migrating to that space more and more, and we believe it reflects how online communities are evolving. 

A more informal and chatty space like Discord provides immediate interaction in real-time with like-minded people and our own developers. It's instant and it’s more fun too. We've enjoyed the platform's development and the direct interaction between our team here and CRYENGINE users around the world, and the growth of the channel suggests you guys find it useful too.  

The CryDev-forum and CRYENGINE Answers are more static and more old-school areas. Of course, both have their value for you and us. They provide a database of content where you can search for answers easily, and they bring both our own content and your content to search engines, so people who might not yet have found the Discord server can find the answers they need when working with CRYENGINE. But we have also seen that most results nowadays lead to YouTube, where we have invested a lot of time to fill your timelines with regular and comprehensive tutorials, and we've seen a lot of uptake there too. 

Looking at the data we have, segregating our community between CRYENGINE Answers and the CryDev forum doesn't really make sense. There's a lot of crossover between the functions of both these services. That means we've decided to retire CRYENGINE Answers and focus on the forum as a static service, for now. Ultimately, while other channels like Discord YouTube are growing, CRYENGINE Answers is our least used community space. It draws upon resources in the Community Team and the CRYENGINE web team that we can better deploy to supporting the services that are growing. 

 So, CRYENGINE Answers will be retired on December 1st.

That means that from today, you will not be able to create a new account on CRYENGINE Answers, and new registrations on CRYENGINE.com will no longer have an Answers account automatically assigned to them. Furthermore, users with an existing account will not be able to make new posts, ask questions, or rate replies. If you would like to save any posts and/or information that have been made available on CRYENGINE Answers, you can do so until December 1st. 

Ultimately, we are looking to the future and we want to do more with CRYENGINE.com. We aim to make CRYENGINE.com a hub where, for instance, you can build a showcase for yourself, as it was in CryDev times. Retiring CRYENGINE Answers gives us more development resources to expand other areas.

Naturally, we're interested in how you guys feel about this change. Please feel free to comment on this blog and let us know what features or services you would like to see in the future, what feedback you have and, what you would like to see in a more interactive CRYENGINE hub.

Let us know your thoughts on the forum or via Facebook and Twitter. Join our community and the CRYENGINE development team over on our official CRYENGINE Discord channel. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all kinds of tutorials and game development content. If you find a bug in the engine, please report it directly on GitHub, which helps us to process the issue quickly and efficiently. 

Are you looking for your next career move? At Crytek, we value diversity, and we actively encourage people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience levels to apply to our open positions, so join us over at LinkedIn and check out our careers page.