I really do not know what to make of this

http://kotaku.com/amazons-new-engine-has-a-zombie-clause-1758126278

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

The biggest question I have about this engine:
Is it ok?

+1 Amazon.

That wouldn't surprise me, they're already competing with Netflix and the Google Play store, so competing with Steam wouldn't be that odd.

Granted their competition is still rather weak.

interesting ...

EDIT: self-correction, there's an .fbx import apparently.

sounds cool will check it out eventually

Can't be very transparent to code for if they manage to restrict the multiplayer like that.
How is such a restriction even possible if it's "Open Source"? Is it just part of the license?

I think you missed a chance to reply with "Indeed I don't, I know Metre". Then again, you thus inadvertently offered me the chance to mention it.

Likely a license restriction only... nothing technologically blocked or opaque about it. Afterall they say black and white you can use your own servers if you own them, you just can't rent servers from AMZ competitors.



To the gamedevs among us:

Not being that much of a techie, and certainly never having programmed at this level, I would be curious at informed opinions comparing what AMZ is making available and what Unity and Unreal have made freely available in the past.

Any obvious pros / cons of the separate engines? And I mean all around... financial, support, license limitations... not just coding.

Don't forget the OGRE engine which is completely OpenSource and under the MIT License.
Torchlight 1+2, Venetica, The Book of Unwritten Tales, Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms and Jack Keane use it for example.

It's legally not "open source" in the github/sourceforge/whatever sense. You can edit the source code for the purposes of your project (a game or multimedia application) but you can't redistribute the code, make forks of it, etc....

Development-wise, seems like UE and Unity are more or less equal depending of your project, it's more a question of workflow habits, learned skills (C++ vs. Java/C#). In terms of documentation and ressources, Unity is far above the rest of engines (books, forums, videos). I don't know about UE situation but the recent tendency to implement features instead of correcting bugs has caused some anger (for example with WebGL export, they only corrected a few days ago the input from arrow buttons which was scrolling the webpage instead of being "understood" by the iframe of the game)

financial/license: The main drawback for UE are the release guidelines (mainly the 5% royalty)
https://www.unrealengine.com/release
On the other side, Unity has this almost-free-for-all and "relaxed license" approach but needless to say that if you do some contract-work, clients won't appreciate to have a "Unity personal edition" as first splash-screen. Besides, the removal of the splash-screen, the Pro features aren't really useful if you're a very small team (1-3 people working on the same place). the offers on the Asset Store Level 11 aren't generally appealing (officials said on the forums it will be revamped).

Concerning, the case of Lumberyard, it's way too early business-wise to dive into it unless you can afford the time/money to learn the engine, deal with bugs, etc. But like I said earlier, a good first project to test out all the features would be some kind of Twitch-driven quizz instead of going all "let's make the next Crysis".

Now of course, things change fast in the business tech field. There are rumours that Unity 6 Pro (due for release next year) could be subscription-only (no more perpetual license then) and naturally this the kind of things where engine competition is appreciatied in order to create alternatives and not get stuck with a monopoly (like with Adobe)

Open-source can mean different things. In the most basic sense it means you can look at the source, but nothing else. Technically any website and its associated HTML/CSS/JavaScript is open-source, but that doesn't give you any rights in itself. It's all just "look but don't touch" because code is governed by copyright laws.

What people usually mean by open-source if Free Software (not to be confused with freeware). According to the FSF (Free Software Foundation) a software qualifies as Free if it meets the following criteria:

- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
- Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
- Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

There might be other definitions, but that's the gist of it. The LumberYard engine does give you access to the source code, but only for internal use, so it does not meet the above criteria.

Amazon, the crackpot seller of cloud-tied software shit of 2016.