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Amazon Launches Free Game Engine Lumberyard
Dave Knott writes: Amazon has both announced and released a new, free game engine, Lumberyard, which offers deep integration with its Amazon Web Services server infrastructure to empower online play, and also with Twitch, its video game-focused streaming service. Lumberyard is powerful and full-featured enough to develop triple-A current-gen console games, with mobile support is coming down the road. Its core engine technology is based on Crytek's CryEngine. However, Lumberyard represents a branch of that tech, and the company is replacing or upgrading many of CryEngine's systems. Monetization for Lumberyard will come strictly through the use of Amazon Web Services' cloud computing. If you use the engine for your game, you're permitted to roll your own server tech, but if you're using a third-party provider, it has to be Amazon. Integration of Amazon's Twitch video streaming tools at a low level also helps to cement that platform's dominance in the game streaming space. Alongside Lumberyard, the company has also announced and released GameLift, a new managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling server-based online games using AWS. GameLift will be available only to developers who use Lumberyard, though it's an optional add-on. The game engine is in beta, but is freely usable and downloadable today.
From https://aws.amazon.com/de/lumb... :
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.
Limberyard is gratis, and free as in beer, but it isn't free as in freedom.
Unity 3D even has continued support for years and years, whereas Mighty No. 9 is all like, "We're having trouble and have to mess with the source code and maintain and bugfix UE3 ourselves because it's no longer updated even though it cost $350,000 per seat!" That was fucking irresponsible, and I called it from the start: they initially budgeted under a million dollars and wanted a (then) half-million-dollar engine instead of the $1,500 Unity 3D engine; they're struggling now even though they got nearly five million dollars of funding.
Maybe if you're Blizzard or Bethesda you can use UE4. It makes sense, even though it's expensive: Ubisoft dumps like 30 huge games every year, so of course they get a lower marginal cost (no matter how low you go, when you divide up a licensing cost across dozens of units, there's a limit to how much you're going to save by taking the less-expensive option). If UE4 does something Unity 3D doesn't and your game will be significantly harder to develop without that feature, deal with it; if this happens and you generally develop dozens of games each year, then maybe you should buy UE4. Of course this applies less now than it did with UE3, since UE3 was ridiculously expensive compared to UE4.
The financials don't make sense. I'd try to fund a moderately-complex game on $100,000 with Unity 3D Pro. It can be done. I computed $58,000 for art for a 2D top-down ARPG, plus another $19,000 for music; I can do the story-writing and much of the programming myself, but a competent programmer will cost you $26,000 in under a full-time 4 months. I'm also a project manager, so I can plan these sorts of things out with reasonable effectiveness, instead of dicking around on a long tail of things going wrong on top of other things going wrong, turning a $100k budget into a $6 million, 9-year project; again, a competent project manager will throw you $100k a year himself. Your real resource costs for a simple 2D or 3D game might be $150k per development-year, plus a relatively fixed cost for assets (3D models, textures, music, animation). If you're making *one* *game*, the cost of your engine is your biggest factor.
That leaves a big question: What are the marginal costs of Lumberyard? Is low cost plus royalty, like UE4? Subscription, like Unity 3D? High cost, like UE3? Answer: It's free plus monetization, like UE4, but with monetization being tie-in service: you can either build an in-house support infrastructure for your online experience, or you can use Amazon. That means if it comes down to engine cost, you might want to go Unity 3D or UE4. The cost of internal infrastructure would exceed the cost of almost *any* outsource service--Amazon, Azure, Verizon--and being tied to Amazon might cost you a lot more than $1,500 for each developer. If so, you need to decide: Will the royalties on UE4 cost you more than Unity? Between all three, will selecting any given one save you enough programmer time to offset the *lifetime* cost of any of these factors?
Financials. I love it.
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