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> 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.

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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.

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