[mikeash]

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.

[acdha]

What I was getting at is the need to actually look at those costs rather than just assuming that it's always better to maximize flexibility. Running your own services has a high up front cost because you have to pay people to build, test, and secure everything before you see any return. You can come up with estimates for the various outcomes and how likely each would be but that's a lot more nuanced than this thread had been, particularly with speculation like “What if they suddenly increase the price by an order of magnitude?”.

The detail which I think techies are particularly prone to forget is that businesses deal with “lock-in” (i.e. contracts) all the time; it has downsides but managing those is routine. In particular, many businesses love to defer up-front costs into a structure where they only need to pay for actual usage.

[jo909]

I agree that the large price increase scenario is pretty unlikely, and not what this is about.

This is about bundling decisions together that do not need to be bundled. Changing the game engine after the fact is about the hardest thing you can do, virtually impossible after a certain stage. The decision for the engine is necessarily a very very early one.

But you can easily and very likely need to improve your backend many many times, even far into the games development or after release. Limiting your options for that so early is very risky.

And your are right, that risk could be offset by some large enough benefit you only get with that engine. I just fail to see where that would be. I can still use all of AWS if I choose an independent game engine.