Also note that you can not use other cloud platforms for your games backend. While I understand their position, I consider that a deal breaker.
Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS?
No. If your game servers use a non-AWS alternate web service,
we obviously don’t make any money, and it’s more difficult for
us to support future development of Lumberyard. 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.
Q. Is it okay for me to use my own servers?
Yes. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game.
That seems pretty crazy to me. I get that they're using this as a loss leader to promote their services, but it seems to me that they'd do much better if they just made it work great with AWS such that it was the natural choice. If you integrate AWS heavily then people will pick it anyway, but if they think it's their own decision they'll be a lot happier with it.
Definitely agree. You'd be at the mercy of Amazon's AWS pricing for the whole lifecycle of your game. Let's say they suddenly increase the price tenfold... you either shut off your multiplayer (not an option for some games), host it all yourself (which would mean buying servers, paying people to maintain them, changing the game to use a new backend, etc.), or switch to another engine (essentially, recreate your game from scratch)
You have to weigh these risks against the likelihood of them actually happening. If AWS made a first-ever price increase, yes, you'd then have to consider whether you could beat that pricing by doing it in-house but you have to balance that against the very low odds of it actually happening and the up-front costs of hiring a ton of staff (e.g. just having 24x7 support requires something like 5 people when you factor in leave, vacations, etc.), buying or renting a lot of hardware, developing and getting operational confidence in a complicated software stack, etc.
That's a LOT of money to spend up front on a gamble that something which has never happened before occurs with so little notice that you wouldn't be able migrate away first. It's hard to see anyone but the major players having enough economy of scale to see positive returns on that investment, much less having enough budget room to where that makes sense rather than spending the same amount of money on something which users actually see.
That gets to the other reason why this is so unlikely: raising prices in a predatory manner would be a loud message to every AWS customer to find alternatives. Since AWS generates something like 7-8 billion dollars a year that's an enormous amount of money to risk — far greater than any short-term return they'd see.
Actually, AWS does this all the time: for new or growing large scale users they offer a discount on the list price. Once the user is firmly embedded in AWS, they stop offering the discount. This can lead to an effective doubling of the cost of using AWS.
I don't understand what you mean by balancing it against the up-front costs of hiring a ton of staff. The whole point here is that if you're not locked in to AWS (because you don't use their free-with-massive-strings-attached game engine) then you can migrate to some other cloud service if AWS no longer suits you.
But they do lock themselves up all the time, on console deals, on cloud platforms (Azure for Xbox, anyone). Isn't this something a proper contract would solve? We are talking about an AAA studio after all.
Exactly. When people see "free, with source code included", they may tend to think that it is open-source. I hope this answer from their FAQ section clears it:
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.
57.6 Registration; Release. Before distributing your
Lumberyard Project to End Users, you must register it at
aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/registration. You must obtain our
prior written consent if the initial public or commercial
release of your Lumberyard Project is based on a version of
the Lumberyard Materials more than 5 years old.
Updates would clearly not be an "initial public or commercial release of your Lumberyard Project".
It's about the first version, you just can't sit on your project forever and still use an old version of the engine when you finally go public. I see no harm in that clause.
This is probably a way to limit supporting legacy versions of AWS as they anticipate the service will evolve over time. It also means that any game based on Lumberyard might not work past 5 years without continued developer updates.