[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...
My favorite quotation: (context: Frazzini is director-lvl) "[...]the team cringed as Frazzini struggled to differentiate between hyper-polished conceptual footage and live gameplay[...]". I am awe-struck, my only response is: LOL
My second favorite tidbit was about their game "New World", in which players "colonize a mythical land and murder inhabitants who bear a striking resemblance to Native Americans". Then refused to believe their employees who said this was racist and offensive. Until they hired a tribal consultant who, indeed, found it offensive.
There's other good things in there as well - not listening to other employees, hiring and then wasting talent, chasing trends, not understanding the industry, not scoping correctly (lumberjack). Even AMZN's culture was restrictive and harmful (IMO especially "leaders are right a lot" lmao, not at all in this case!).
Could you imagine working in an industry for a decade, and then being in this position? Where your boss literally cannot differentiate between a rendered video and a pre-release video game - but the culture has an in-built "you're probably wrong, peon" attitude? I'd leave so fast I'd probably forget my desk plants!
Negotiate for fat RSUs because they need your industry experience. Placate the dumb boss long enough for stock to vest. Use stock gainz to finance a studio with former competent team mates. Sell successful IP back to AMZN. Retire to building goofy kids games.
...wait a minute
Hardspace: Shipbreaker, on the other hand had a unqiue idea and was a critical success, and in a retrospective the developers were very explicit not to impose a top-down attitude to development. [3] (disclaimer: I work at Blackbird Interactive, but not on Hardspace: Shipbreaker)
[1] http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/sinandpunishm...
[2] http://shmuplations.com/aliensoldier/
[3] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026825/Forging-Hardspace-Ship...
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-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.
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/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
Gems, the non crytek plugin system: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/6b8dd98ad0e59b1817a79...
A big dump of 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/CryEn...
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 )
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.
Seems like you’d need an instance of the game with its own GPU for every viewer.
Twitch plays Pokemon worked fine .
You would basically just need to stream the cameras output texture to a web app, and then read inputs from from said web app. Regardless there's no reason to try and create a whole new engine for this, CryTek has always been known as one of the worst engines to work in, just because it's not supported very well.
The way I would personally do it I would maybe create a multiplayer game and for each ten cameras spin up a game client instance.
According to the other comments here it looks like Amazon wanted to create some type of bizarro system where if you use their engine you had to use AWS as your cloud back end. Which does sound pretty horrible, like I can't even do a HTTP request to get weather data unless it goes through AWS ?
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.
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.
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
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.
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.
Unless you have a contract dispute with them, in which case they bankrupt you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Human#Unreal_Engine_disput...
I don't think contract dispute is the right word. The developer sued epic for things it knew about in advance. Epic countersued and won.
Unity is pretty much none existent in AAA, it's mostly a mobile engine.
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 .
HDRP is still new, give it a few years.