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 o

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.