Its a good deal but there’s a lot of Game engines out there so unless they have invented something new and radical I’m not even gonna bother looking at it.
I was actually caught off guard by the release of Lumberyard. I was excited at first, then I realized it was built off CryEngine and I became sad. I am still all about Unreal, and will always be but I think the biggest feature that LY has over UE4 that I would love to have is the twitch chat integration. That is a huge feature that I would to get my hands on. Other then that. No thanks.
Was going to test it, instantly crashes on level creation. Fun.
You still have to pay for the infrastructure. It’s the classic AWS sales technique.
Well, I gotta admit that a lot of the features from CryEngine would be neat in UE.
For example, the water, the vegetation and the POM.
I will be trying it. From what I can see one of the biggest draws will be Gamelift and it has an interesting monetization scheme imo. You can see it here. Amazon GameLift Pricing - Amazon Web Services
With the twitch integration and use of AWS and Gamelift this is a fairly smart move by Amazon. Its just became a whole lot easier for creators and Amazon to capitalize on the eSport and MOBA front. Just think of the rash of FPS/MOBA’s that will be created with Lumberyard…Or maybe I’m looking at things differently.
Now I wonder why there is no Amazon fork for UE4 with networking.
From what I read they gutted stock CE3 networking and replaced with their own.
It would be interesting to have the same thing for Unreal. I mean leave existing interface for networking, but replace underhood with Amazon services. Would be that even possible with plugins ?
The thing is Amazon payed s**t ton o money for this to Crytek back in the day ( in fact saved Crytek from bankruptcy) and they have been working on this for around a year now.
Chances are Amazon has some veeery long term plans for this thing and without a doubt keep supporting/ Improving Lumber Yard for years to come. It really worths a try.
Of course many people heavily invested in UE4 and it may not make much sense to suddenly switch over. But hey ! It is free. You can download it and keep it somewhere and try it out when you have the time. If you like it, good. If you don’t, what’s the loss ? 
You might not know there’s an issue until you’re deep into a development project, in which case it’s better to stick with something you know will work than wasting time on messing with other stuff.
lol Lumberyard…
I am interested in this mutliplayer system and quick scale with high performance to meet player demands (at least they declare this). Something that in my opinion UE4 is missing a little bit.
Yeah I really wonder who thought it was a good idea to sign a multi-million dollar licensing deal and call the resulting product: “Lumberyard”.
The promotional video showing off Zbrush, Maya and… dogs? Instead of the engine features is also pretty weird.
That’s kind of nitpicking though… my main concern is will this engine maintain feature parity with CryEngine over time?!?
I mean the whole point of CryEngine is its incredibly powerful rendering features. If they don’t put in the latest ones then I see no point in using this over CryEngine.
Ah well they are giving Lumberyard source away for free for Singleplayer games… so more power to them.
Yeah LumberYard 
The thing is currently it is supposed to be on par. Because LumberYard has it’s own SVOTI called “Total Illumination” . At least we can trust we will have beatifulli fast, no build required renders from this.
And after that I can see a lot of skilled render programmer going to work for Amazon, because… well… money and… Amazon ?
So I think they will focus on renderer greatly.
Twitch discontinued the SDK. As far as I am aware development for twitch intergration for UE4 has been stopped.
Everything’s free? Except one of the “most advertised features”, AWS?
I think this looks , even if it’s not for me. It’s a great time to be a game developer!
AWS is how they make money from it; If you make a single player game or run it from your own server then it’s completely free, the only limitation is you are not allowed allowed to use a 3rd party online system that charges, which seems pretty reasonable as that’s their only income stream from the product.
well, same old CryENGINE, name = program between our host here and that …other …thing.
(I downloaded, installed (quite some manual dependency installing and shifting around…) and run the thing.)
Engine and its workflows have changed only in minute details since CryENGINE 2.0.
User/Gamedev friendliness gets an “F” as in FAIL from me.
After clicking the second button (Was the UI editor thing I wanted to try out) it simply crashed.
Material Editor, well we know that thing as material instance of the most basic variety. xD
the list goes on and on and on…
Source Code…
Compiler setup is automatic as we are used to, but I tried reading the code…lets just say there is a steep learning curve there (as with every complex piece of application) though what I gathered and confirmed from my previous experience…the naming of stuff is pretty academic and less descriptive IMHO.
Yes, even though for seven years I have been a CryENGINE advocate and fanboy, but today as a developer I cannot leave a single good thing remain on it.
It does make me sad a little 
UE4 opened my eyes how an, well, EPIC! engine can be - I will be sticking around 
I know CryEngine rightly gets a lot of stick, but honestly, there are a ton of cool features in there that Unreal does not (yet) have:
- LUA scripting
- Native WWISE integration
- Built-in polygonal modelling via Cryengine Designer
- Automatic mesh LOD generation
- Working MSAA on a fully deferred renderer
- Game-ready AI out of the box (with stealth!)
- Working (albeit slow) voxel-based global illumination
Please don’t take this to be a ‘screw UE, I’m moving to Cryengine/Lumberyard’ type comment. I still love UE in spite of some major gripes with it, I’m just also really excited to see where Amazon take an engine that has a ton of unrealised potential. Amazon have the clout and the talent to sort a lot of Cryengine’s problems (poor interface, poor documentation, poor asset pipeline, poor support), and I think that when they crack that, we’re going to have yet another amazing free development tool to work with. Everybody wins!
Yeah, I was kind of surprised they didn’t have a blender support. I was subbed to this for awhile and the blender exporter worked. The engine may be great but the lack of a pipeline to get assets in makes it unusable to many.