> I never understood why Amazon rolled another engine.
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.
Can you imagine spending tens of millions on a game then getting blocked from AWS on a policy violation and not being able to move it to another provider?
I can’t imagine any sane AAA game dev agreeing to those demands.
The license (last I checked anyways) also lets you self-host your servers. If you can afford the upfront costs for that, it's probably cheaper in the long run. IIRC, part of the motivation for Roblox's IPO was to raise funds to setup their own hosting infrastructure to lower costs, because AWS was too expensive.
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.
and I'm sure there would be an incentive (financial) to using all amazon services/storefront etc.
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.
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.