> Is Amazon really getting value
    > out of all the dev time they are
    > putting into building game engines?

What an odd way to think about projects like these. It seems obvious that the answer is "of course not, yet".

You could have asked the same question about AWS in 2001. Why is a bookstore putting all this effort into some online hosting platform for third parties?

AWS was reusing their existing infrastructure and expertise and opening it up to 3rd parties.

I'm unclear why Amazon needs a custom game engine. They must have some plans to enter this area, maybe make their own VR headsets?

Not really. They mostly built a second parallel system for aws and moved to using it several years after launch. Yes they used knowledge that existed in house but it was a totally separate project and mini company

We imagined that Amazon AWS was letting us use a few of their servers that were idle because it was not the Xmas rush. This was a convenient narrative at the time and it explained the competitive pricing. Reality was that it was a different gig.

I believe that was the goal, but like any large endeavor it took a while to get going.

In a word: Kindle.

Amazon et al may anticipate VR becoming HUGE in the future, so they'd best start creating top-tier easy-access infrastructure & tools for supporting it. Each will want to be THE go-to for customers, just like e-book customers mostly go to Kindle (and a few competitors provide solid alternatives, like iBooks); wasn't that long ago most of us watched the e-book reader market explode onto the scene with lots of competition between B&N, Kobo, Sony, Amazon, Apple, and anyone else that could create a viable e-ink tablet. Similar happened with streaming video, with just a few set-top boxes surviving (Amazon FireTV, Apple TV, Roku, and a few others). All these need a solid, cheap, desirable content-creation platform and distribution system.

Next up is VR: when you're going to render content, what distribution platform will you build for? how will you sell it? what's the go-to store for buying virtual worlds? Bezos & co will want you to choose Amazon Lumberyard &/| Sumerian (and Tim Cook & co will persuade accordingly toward Apple rOS, and Facebook is figuring out how to position Oculus, etc).

But look at all of the other additions on top of AWS now - you're not just getting bare metals, you're getting an entire stack from the machine to the speech output. They have the bare metal, they're just ramping up the value adds in verticals they know can be huge (plus, building... and I hate the word... synergies with Twitch).

All of that CryEngine expertise was probably going to go down the toilet - am going to assume it's been comparatively cheap for them to get a AAA game engine into their locker.

I can think of a couple of reasons why Amazon might be interested in VR, from displaying 3D views of their products to constructing a virtual mall for browsing.

VR online shopping could be a massive thing one day.

Reminds me of the virtual reality access to the market in the movie Valerian.

Amazon owns Twitch and presented the Twitch Launcher not too long ago, which is basically a Steam competitor. Game engines are probably gonna be given for free to devs to build games specifically on this platform.

Given the hype about running games virtualized in AWS, no it is not unclear. Amazon wants a game engine native to their cloud, rather than a PC engine running on virtualized hardware, so people can start thinking really big about VR or games, rather than "one machine at a time" models.

I think this is one of those things that nobody expects that will be obvious in hindsight. Offloading rendering and game logic/AI to a massively parallel server network will allow MMOGs to break new ground in world complexity and persistence, and sell subscriptions to more people that can't afford dedicated gaming machines.

I think it would be doable for most current MMORPGS which aren't very timing sensitive so even if you have a couple hundred ms of lag it could still be playable (especially if the game is designed around this limitation).

VR however is one application where network lag would clearly be totally unacceptable. Can you imagine having even 50ms of lag while turning your head in a game? It seems like out of all the applications of "cloud gaming" this would be the least suitable one. It's not even about the game feeling laggy and floaty, it's about not getting sick while playing it.

I guess they could render a huge FoV for every eye and let the client do the actual tracking to mask some of the latency, but I'm not sure how you can make any translation work that way.

I'm not saying it's impossible and it'll never happen but if that's really the objective it seems they're doing it the wrong way around. Shouldn't they first develop "cloud gaming" infrastructure and then move on to the particular niche of VR?

Ah, yeah I was thinking more generally than VR. The R&D efforts at Oculus to reduce latency from GPU to viewport indicate that network rendering isn't going to work unless you anticipate and buffer the set of every frame the user could possibly require shortly ahead of time; technically possible for low-fidelity graphics I guess but very inefficient (although now that I'm thinking about it you would have to include all possible states of all non-static game assets as well, which creates a combinatorial explosion; I don't see how it could possibly work).

Regarding cloud gaming, Nvidia has a service in beta, but Amazon seems well positioned for a monopoly in this space (for both developer and consumer use cases) and I'm surprised they haven't been pushing hard for it. I've been using Paperspace heavily for cloud gaming for the last six months and it's a very compelling value proposition. All things considered I'd still rather have a dedicated custom PC, but I can't justify spending $2,000 up front for something that is already good enough at $0.60/hr on demand. You can imagine how big the market could be if instead of selling loss-making consoles you could just push a smart TV app that connects to a cloud gaming service and eliminate the console upgrade cycle. It would also be much easier to lure users from other networks if they don't have to invest $300 in a console to switch. I don't know if it would be a losing proposition for Microsoft and Sony but it could be an entry point for a leaner competitor to get a leg up on the incumbents.

Also, they can sell to "casual" gamers. Rent a character and just go. Don't pay for more than you use.

Doesn't look like they're intending sumerian it as a game engine at all. Looks like it's to construct enterprise products, like sales-training seminars in VR, with minimal programming.

https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/ is pretty explicit there.

I think the answer is that none of the big companies want to be completely left behind when it comes to the big three technologies (AR / VR / AI). Even though they don't have any big VR or AR hardware this is a way to say they're investing in the space and carving out a niche. They see these engines as a way to sell AWS offerings. One area being servers for games, another being bots and AI and a third being hosting for immersive media. Some immersive technologies will have huge requirements in terms of bandwidth (for instance, offering high def 360 video with lightfields or depth information). They haven't come to fruition yet, but in a decade, who knows?

StarCitizen is based on Lumberyard now. In theory, any game using the right versions of CryEngine can move to Lumberyard as well, for whatever reason they might choose to do that.

Really? It seems like they keep refactoring all the time. Feels like Duke Nukem whenever, which switched engines a couple of times too during development.

Lumberyard is a forked version of CryEngine, which Star Citzen was already using (fairly heavily modified for 64 bit precision) so the move to Lumberyard wasn't as big as it seems. They do however refactor other systems like items and inventory quite often which seems to be slowing down development although the new versions do seem like improvements.

Scope creep also knows nothing of Chris Roberts at the helm a crowd funding runaway train. At this point it's now suffering from Hubble's law of the expanding universe, rather than scope creep.

I think they are at last at a scope now that makes sense for a full release. They had to build a hundreds strong, multi-location production team before even getting up to full steam. Games with significantly less scope have taken much longer, without hurdles like that.

It's a double edged sword, because open development has been what drove the crowd funding to such incredible heights (they made 2 million in 48 hours this week, for a total funding so far of 167 million). But it is also the reason for so many people being negative about it's development. People get fatigued of it.

Charles Foster Kane^W^W^WJeff Bezos: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 100,000 years.

AR/VR in product sales is expected to be a multi-billion dollar market. This isn't a game engine, this is a brand/marketing engine with game mechanics.

This doesn’t feel like a competitor to Unity, it feels more like what I’ve heard of Second Life being used for.

Not an actual competitor to it, but almost like a reimagination without the social aspect, instead just being a sort of world builder. Like Minecraft with real objects

Virtual shopping malls via VR and better product information through AR.

AWS will take a shot at nearly every meaningful service that can be shoe-horned into what they do. Some will work, some will fail, they'll keep taking shots. It's really that simple for Amazon. Not much is off limits.

Ten years from now, the majority of AR & VR experiences will not be derived from traditional gaming engines like Unity. They'll be built & live on AWS, GC, Azure or similar. It'll be done so as to remove as many units of labor from the process as possible.

If they can get some attractive software and prime some devs ready for their new AR device it may be worth it.

> their new AR device

I haven't heard this rumor, care to fill us in?

I'd be interested too, though I'd be surprised if they weren't all at it. Especially those who missed out on the smartphone thing.

Indeed :) Me too... I'm just assuming, given they have a captive audience, the hardware chops to deliver electronic devices at scale and a huge pile of cash, they would be foolish not to be working on it, while Google Glass was a headline failure, the Hololens most certainly is not, it's just received it's safety rating for on site use, the applications I've seen in use in industrial design show that this technology is not going away.

hang on... [edit]

"Amazon working on first wearables to interact with Alexa Company’s ‘smart glasses’ would come with in-home virtual assistant embedded" Sept 20, 2017 oh, look, https://www.ft.com/content/d7862042-9d9a-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf...

There is nothing random about the world's most powerful retailer wanting the basis of virtual retail to be based on an 3D engine they control, and not one controlled by an independent third party, such as Unity.

To the extent that Amazon makes a profit on AWS (and I guess I'm not sure that they do), it would make sense for them to work on things that cost them money, but increase usage of AWS.

They own Twitch. They want to expand the games market so there are more people to stream and watch games.

they're big enough that they can justify what appear to be random experiments...although they risk getting tarred with the same brush as Google when they shut them down