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Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

The wording is rather strange.

>free AAA game engine

Doesn't being called that require that there are AAA games developed with it? According to wikipedia,

"In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") or Triple-A is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion or the highest ratings by a consensus of professional reviewers."

So if it's an engine for games with highest development budgets, why would they care about the engine being free? Clearly choosing a free engine is a cost-saving measure, at which point you're no longer making an AAA game by definition.

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> Doesn't being called that require that there are AAA games developed with it

Lumberyard looks like it's mostly CryEngine plus extras, and CryEngine has been used for a number of "triple A" games for a decade now. (including recent titles like Crysis 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, Star Citizen, Evolve, Homefront, State of Decay, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

> choosing a free engine is a cost-saving measure, at which point you're no longer making an AAA game by definition

Not necessarily. 2 of the most popular game engines, Unreal Engine and Unity3d, have very good free offerings now and many AAA games have been made with them.

You can have multi-million dollar development budgets and only be using "free" engines without issue nowadays.

Except that, at that level, it is no longer 'free'. Unity will likely be the Pro version (still peanuts). Unreal will also get a chunk of the pie. It's only free up to a point, which is reasonable.

Just as Lumberyard is only free up to the point you actually deploy it on AWS, at which point Amazon are making money on your hosting.

They mean the engine is capable of powering AAA titles (and it is, because it's CryEngine at heart). So users get that level of utility from something that doesn't cost anything.

I would understand "AAA game engine" as merely meaning that it is suitable for making AAA games. I don't see why that phrasing would require an existing AAA game developed with it, unless you require an existence proof of its capabilities before you believe it.

Devils advocate: An argument could me made that this is a AAA grade engine, referring to it's capabilities not customers. Much like the US Army doesn't necessarily buy all clothing labeled 'Military Spec' or 'Tactical' etc

"Tactical" label is mostly empty fluff, "milspec" means it meets a published military specification -- which, absent specifying which specification, is also fluff.

So, if the point of your analogy is that this use of the AAA label is empty fluff, then, mission accomplished.

Royalty based models are quickly becoming the norm for even AAA engines. Source 2, Unity, Unreal, and now this version of crytek utilize this model. This pretty much means that the top 4 game engines now have a "free" option.

It's describing the engine and the games that have been produced with it, not necessarily the games that will be created with it in the future. Crysis 3 was definitely a AAA game.

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