Comment by renownedmedia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renownedmedia | Hacker News Reader

Note: This isn't Open Source, though the source code is available.

> Q. Is Lumberyard “open source”?

> No. We make the source code available to enable you to fully customize your game, but your rights are limited by the Lumberyard Service Terms. For example, you may not publicly release the Lumberyard engine source code, or use it to release your own game engine.

What's really interesting is that you can't use Lumberyard to communicate with game servers if they are hosted on a competing cloud platform; only AWS or server hardware you own:

> Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?

> No. If your game servers use a non-AWS alternate web service, we obviously don’t make any money, and it’s more difficult for us to support future development of Lumberyard. 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.

Did you think they were giving the game engine away out of altruism? They obviously want to have someone create the next World of Warcraft tied to AWS.

That'll never happen and it's very unlikely to be their intention. Any game on a similar scale/scope as World of Warcraft doesn't need such atrocious license terms.

UE and Source both have much more reasonable license terms and smaller-scoped games will go with Unity unless they build their own engine.

My guess on what they are probably looking for is probably desperate indie or small-size studios that want something bigger than unity, they'll give a bunch of AWS credit to them in order to try lock them in. Even that is a long shot.

Edit: Had another read through this. Honestly I still don't see what the attraction is. There's bigger names out there with better engines and more favorable agreements.

Edit 2: Mixed up engines.

UE wants 5% of revenue full stop. (After the first $3k/quarter.) But even for a small shop like ours, with 7 employees, that's very expensive, PLUS we pay for servers on top of it.

Forced/licensed integration may not be for some people, but this isn't that expensive, comparatively, in the end.

If you are making a AAA game in UE4, Mark Rein fully expects you to visit him in his office and negotiate a custom license. That's the way UE1-3 operated. 5% is the default for the masses and for most projects it's much cheaper than a custom license would have cost.

Right, but we're not making AAA games. When comparing Unity Pro licenses to UE4 and others (now Amazon) for smaller game studios, UE4 is still compelling technologically. That said, it's licensing for a small studio like ours if far more expensive than Unity.

My point was basically that Amazon's pricing isn't outrageous, comparatively.

Their pricing is fine (it's very competitive as I mentioned below). Their license terms are not fine. Lock in is awful.

Lock-in!

Ok! But why is that bad? Unity3d is lock-in. Flash was lock-in. Hell, writing your own engine is lock-in, because rewriting that chunk of technology is so time consuming it could easily bankrupt a smaller game company.

Of course Amazon wants lock-in. It's what they're selling. But we all make decisions about who we want to be married to and to what degree we want an open marriage. All of us in the game (et al) industry are "locked in" in many ways.

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