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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

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.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. Unless you have a contract dispute with them, in which case they bankrupt you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_disput...
- senkora 6y ago
  I saw a talk about Lumberyard once. The really special things they wanted to do were integrate it tightly with AWS and Twitch, which enabled some neat features like letting people spectate games and move their own camera around the field to do so.
  - franknine 6y ago
    You cannot use service from any other cloud provider as your game backend if you use Lumberyard. https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS? No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
    - brnt 6y ago
      AWS. Alternate Web Service. Heh.
  - williamdclt 6y ago
    I know absolutely nothing of game dev, but adding cameras to the scene doesn't sound like it would be the most complex aspect of developping a video game?
    - senkora 6y ago
      Imagine a Twitch livestream with tens of thousands of viewers, and each one is able to independently move a live camera to get the view they want. The complexity comes from scale.
      - arduinomancer 6y ago
        Yeah that sounds like a really expensive feature. Seems like you’d need an instance of the game with its own GPU for every viewer.
- Thaxll 6y ago
  UE is a generic engine, it's not good at specialized games like open words. Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    HDRP begs to differ https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
    - Thaxll 6y ago
      Name a single AAA game in Unity? Everyone can do a shiny scene with good lighting, making a $50M game with it is another story.
      - offtop5 6y ago
        https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/ https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/ HDRP is still new, give it a few years.
        thatguy0900 6y ago
        Is tarkov a triple A game? I guess it's pretty subjective but I wouldn't have guessed it was
- bogwog 6y ago
  I disagree with this a lot. Building your own engine offers many advantages, especially for a company with ambitions like Amazon. If anyone should build their own engine, it's them. Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards. I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet. Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error) However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.
Arelius 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. If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place. Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment. edit: To add links to the code: ly framework, clearly core engine systems unrelated to cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Code/Framework https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Gems https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... A big dump of cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Code/CryEngine https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... Which we can see has been dramatically shrunken in the time since the initial commit: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEngine https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEn...

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.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > If you use epic's engine, they charge you less to sell your games. Unless you have a contract dispute with them, in which case they bankrupt you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_disput...
senkora 6y ago
I saw a talk about Lumberyard once. The really special things they wanted to do were integrate it tightly with AWS and Twitch, which enabled some neat features like letting people spectate games and move their own camera around the field to do so.
- franknine 6y ago
  You cannot use service from any other cloud provider as your game backend if you use Lumberyard. https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS? No. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-AWS web service that is similar to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers.
  - brnt 6y ago
    AWS. Alternate Web Service. Heh.
- williamdclt 6y ago
  I know absolutely nothing of game dev, but adding cameras to the scene doesn't sound like it would be the most complex aspect of developping a video game?
  - senkora 6y ago
    Imagine a Twitch livestream with tens of thousands of viewers, and each one is able to independently move a live camera to get the view they want. The complexity comes from scale.
    - arduinomancer 6y ago
      Yeah that sounds like a really expensive feature. Seems like you’d need an instance of the game with its own GPU for every viewer.
Thaxll 6y ago
UE is a generic engine, it's not good at specialized games like open words. Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.
- offtop5 6y ago
  HDRP begs to differ https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE https://youtu.be/cQvW0SdprQE I'm currently building a game in HDRP and it's easily looks just as good as anything I could do in Unreal. I'm only limited by my own time at this point .
  - Thaxll 6y ago
    Name a single AAA game in Unity? Everyone can do a shiny scene with good lighting, making a $50M game with it is another story.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/ https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/ HDRP is still new, give it a few years.
      - thatguy0900 6y ago
        Is tarkov a triple A game? I guess it's pretty subjective but I wouldn't have guessed it was
bogwog 6y ago
I disagree with this a lot. Building your own engine offers many advantages, especially for a company with ambitions like Amazon. If anyone should build their own engine, it's them. Sure, they didn't release any (good) games, but I don't think the situation would be much different if they'd have used Unreal or Unity instead. Some of the complaints from devs were that Lumberyard was hard to work with, but that's a common thing to hear from new engines. Devs working on Metal Gear Solid V said the same thing about their custom Fox Engine, yet MGSV is a spectacular game that won a ton of GOTY awards. I used LY for a game jam a few years back, and it was pretty painful to work with. They have some weird custom message passing system for components to communicate with each other safely, which seemed to me like the type of over-engineered, almost enterprise-like system a tech giant like Amazon would make. That sucked. It also has two physics engines: a "deprecated" one from CryEngine and Nvidia PhysX which wasn't actually fully supported yet. Development was a pain in the ass, and while I did finish the game in time for the game jam, I couldn't get it to produce a shippable build of the game in time (each build took over an hour before failing with an unhelpful error) However, if they iron out all of the bugs, and clean up/finish all of the incomplete stuff, and I get used to their message passing system, then LY is a really enticing value proposition. The engine is 100% free, with the only catch being that any backend stuff needs to be hosted on AWS or self-hosted. And while that could potentially be a deal-breaker for multiplayer games, it's a no-brainer for many others. Having an option like that in addition to Unity's up-front license payment and Unreal's 5% would be great for everyone, even if Amazon can't make a single decent game.

Arelius 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. If you start to dig in (source-code is one available source) What actually is clearly the story is they started building a game engine, some higher-up bought a license to CryEngine and told them "Here! Use this!" Then they packaged that up as a module in the Engine they started building initially, and spent the next 5 years slowly deleting bits of CryEngine and replacing it with the engine they wanted to build in the first place. Not that that's much better, but I think it clearly speaks to the politics at play in the environment. edit: To add links to the code: ly framework, clearly core engine systems unrelated to cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Code/Framework https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Gems https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... A big dump of cryengine: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79f6aaf5b89afb41b1086/dev/Code/CryEngine https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79... Which we can see has been dramatically shrunken in the time since the initial commit: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEngine https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Code/CryEn...