6 ms·

For context, Amazon is also struggling to make first party games [1]. I think it was hubris that these large companies didn't start with smaller scoped games an

by tmpz22 6y ago

For context, Amazon is also struggling to make first party games [1]. I think it was hubris that these large companies didn't start with smaller scoped games and instead jumped head first into building their own engines and ips. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-game-studios-struggles-to-find-a-hit https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Perhaps hubris. But it could also be the same thing that plagues every developer that tries to build games: procrastinating the impossible part (building games, especially games worth a damn) by the doing the easy part (building tools). And the delusion that you're doing anything of value because it feels productive. And the allure of generalization.
- narrator 6y ago
  What's funny is a friend of mine who is a talented developer and started a game studio surprised me when he started blogging about his experience and he was solely focused on the characters, story development, animation, etc. Instead of technology. Reading about the problems Amazon has been having, this seems like the only way to go.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Did amazon build their own engine? I thought they licensed cryengine and slapped their brand on it?
wlesieutre 6y ago
They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Amazon-Web-Services-Announces-Amazon-Lumberyard-%E2%80%94-A-Free-Cross-Platform-3D-Game-Engine-Integrated-with-AWS-and-Twitch https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama... This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!" http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-is-sinking-wages-are-unpaid-talent-leaving-on-a-daily-basis/ http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-i... Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work. A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.
- offtop5 6y ago
  I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it. Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    > I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      In Lumberyard's case, the engine is free but you're locked in to AWS for any cloud services
      - LegitShady 6y ago
        and I'm sure there would be an incentive (financial) to using all amazon services/storefront etc. The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
      - alasdair_ 6y ago
        Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider? I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
        bogwog 6y ago
        The license (last I checked anyways) also lets you self-host your servers. If you can afford the upfront costs for that, it's probably cheaper in the long run. IIRC, part of the motivation for Roblox's IPO was to raise funds to setup their own hosting infrastructure to lower costs, because AWS was too expensive. And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files. So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.
Noos 6y ago
It's probably more that PC gaming is just saturated anyways, and even throwing money at it won't work unless there is a clear and compelling advantage or hook. There are way too many market killers that just suck up time and attention now, with the rise of games as service.
eulers_secret 6y ago
Here's an article I read the other day on this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-just-anything-except-good-150004900.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-just-anything-except-g... My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive. There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!). Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
  - whymauri 6y ago
    I... know about someone who did exactly this (minus selling IP back to AMZN).
  - bogwog 6y ago
    But then the studio will rarely, if ever, release games. And if they do, they'll probably be so bad they'll need to be recalled! ...wait a minute

by tmpz22 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Perhaps hubris. But it could also be the same thing that plagues every developer that tries to build games: procrastinating the impossible part (building games, especially games worth a damn) by the doing the easy part (building tools). And the delusion that you're doing anything of value because it feels productive. And the allure of generalization.

narrator 6y ago
What's funny is a friend of mine who is a talented developer and started a game studio surprised me when he started blogging about his experience and he was solely focused on the characters, story development, animation, etc. Instead of technology. Reading about the problems Amazon has been having, this seems like the only way to go.

jjoonathan 6y ago

Did amazon build their own engine? I thought they licensed cryengine and slapped their brand on it?

wlesieutre 6y ago

They didn't really build their own engine, they bought a re-licensable license to CryEngine, rebranded it to Lumberyard, and started their engine work from that. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Amazon-Web-Services-Announces-Amazon-Lumberyard-%E2%80%94-A-Free-Cross-Platform-3D-Game-Engine-Integrated-with-AWS-and-Twitch https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160209005740/en/Ama... This sale is speculated to have saved Crytek from bankruptcy, as they were failing to pay their employees at the time. Lucky for Crytek, and Amazon was probably thinking "man, we got a great deal on this!" http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-is-sinking-wages-are-unpaid-talent-leaving-on-a-daily-basis/ http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/source-crytek-i... Unfortunately the engine they got a great deal on was CryEngine, which has made some cool games, but by a lot of accounts is not great to work in. Much like the issues reported at EA's studios (with Frostbite), if you're working on a game in it you want to be working closely with the engine devs. They're the ones who know how to make it work, or can fix it when it doesn't work. A number of CryEngine developers left to join Cloud Imperium's Frankfurt office working on Star Citizen. That office basically exists to pick up the ex-Crytek people who wanted a job where they'd get paid. I don't know if Amazon snagged any of them, it would've been a harder sell to relocate to the US, but with the amount of money they were pouring into this, not impossible.

offtop5 6y ago
I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. Unreal and Unity are both fantastic. Let your dev teams pick from one of those two and be done with it. Unless your doing something really special theirs no reason to build an engine( if your goal is shipping games )
- LegitShady 6y ago
  > I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine. For the same synergistic effects as Epic and their game store + their engine. If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. It's basically trying to incentivize selling on their platform and using their platform tools at the same time.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    In Lumberyard's case, the engine is free but you're locked in to AWS for any cloud services
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      and I'm sure there would be an incentive (financial) to using all amazon services/storefront etc. The reason they started with lumberyard was because amazon does platform thinking. Unlike open source they can't just take it, so they bought cryengine to start with.
    - alasdair_ 6y ago
      Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider? I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
      - bogwog 6y ago
        The license (last I checked anyways) also lets you self-host your servers. If you can afford the upfront costs for that, it's probably cheaper in the long run. IIRC, part of the motivation for Roblox's IPO was to raise funds to setup their own hosting infrastructure to lower costs, because AWS was too expensive. And if you're making a single-player game, or a p2p multiplayer game, then you'd only need AWS for matchmaking servers and maybe some other simple accounts/databases, or like S3 to distribute content files. So while it is a stupid decision on paper to lock yourself into a single vendor, I think it could work out in a lot of cases. It might even be cheaper than Unreal, which takes a 5% cut, as long as Amazon doesn't decide to exploit their relationship with you.

Noos 6y ago

It's probably more that PC gaming is just saturated anyways, and even throwing money at it won't work unless there is a clear and compelling advantage or hook. There are way too many market killers that just suck up time and attention now, with the rise of games as service.

eulers_secret 6y ago

Here's an article I read the other day on this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-just-anything-except-good-150004900.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-just-anything-except-g... My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive. There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!). Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!

mywittyname 6y ago
> Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
- whymauri 6y ago
  I... know about someone who did exactly this (minus selling IP back to AMZN).
- bogwog 6y ago
  But then the studio will rarely, if ever, release games. And if they do, they'll probably be so bad they'll need to be recalled! ...wait a minute