I'm also wondering if it's not "less" than a fork, i mean with the new cryengine anouncements, are they still actively getting cry updates or did they fork and have to work alone past that? If the later lumber sounds like a bad deal, specially now that cryengine also is free (pay what you want, including 0, no strings attached).

Question of course is how much resources CryTek has left to improve CryEngine further IF the rumours of their financial troubles is true.

Maybe they struck the deal with Amazon to give CryEngine an overhaul with the money, without mentioning the fact to Amazon? That would be rather cunning of them!

On the other hand, if not the skills and expierience, Amazon would have the money to get lumberyard to where it needs to be to be competitive with Unity and UE4 in the Indie and low budget AA space...

Could turn out to be an interesting arms race between the two of them.

Question of course is how much resources CryTek has left to improve CryEngine further IF the rumours of their financial troubles is true.

Maybe they struck the deal with Amazon to give CryEngine an overhaul with the money, without mentioning the fact to Amazon? That would be rather cunning of them!
On the other hand, if not the skills and expierience, Amazon would have the money to get lumberyard to where it needs to be to be competitive with Unity and UE4 in the Indie and low budget AA space...

Could turn out to be an interesting arms race between the two of them.

Those rumours are years old, and since then, they were confirmed by staff speaking out about overdue pay, CryTek studio closures, and the sale of assets...

Both Cry and Amazon have said that CryEngine and Lumberyard will diverge, and have already done so seeing that the sale happened so long ago.

It's not the first time this has happened -- FarCry 2 (not a CryTek game) was based on CryEngine 1 (the FarCry 1 engine), given to Ubisoft, heavily modified and renamed Dunia. There's probably still small traces of the code left in FarCry Primal (though hopefully not much :P ).

I've worked in Engine teams before, and it's normal for, with each new game:
• Large chunks of new technology to get written from scratch.
• A side-by-side replacement for some existing system to sidle in.
• Old code to get refactored.
• Older code paths to become unused and start suffering code rot.
• Rotten code to be deleted.

Over the course of a few games, entire engine systems can completely die off and get replaced with new code.
I would be extremely surprised if CryEngine and Lumberyard weren't already extremely different!

Rather than "Amazon lumberyard, what's the point ?" I think the question is Cry Engine, what is the point now ?
They launched some "pay what you want" subscription model at GDC but I have yet to find a game in development using Cry Engine outside of Crytek (and Robert Space Industry)

It's a bit sad given that they made SSAO and dynamic GI popular but I'm not sure they can stand against the other engine companies.

Rather than "Amazon lumberyard, what's the point ?" I think the question is Cry Engine, what is the point now ?
They launched some "pay what you want" subscription model at GDC but I have yet to find a game in development using Cry Engine outside of Crytek (and Robert Space Industry)

It's a bit sad given that they made SSAO and dynamic GI popular but I'm not sure they can stand against the other engine companies.

Did you ever download CryEngine and had a look at it? At least 3 years ago when I did, I was shocked about how stoneage their editor was, and how buggy their example projects.

I never went on to look at their API anymore, there were better engines available, so I moved on.

But I guess bad first impressions like this will make a lot of studios shy away from using it, now that there is so much competition in this space, many of them with quite attractive deals.

CryEngine is living mostly from past glory and the impression of a lot of gamers that a) the engine makes a big difference in game performance and looks (it does, but not to the degree many gamers believe), and b) that CryEngine is a good engine because CryTek introduced some eye candy stuff and had the nerve to throw it in their engine and use it in their games when the average PC was years away from handling that kind of GPU load.

Being the benchmark engine/game that review sites use to stress a system is, in my opinion, not really a good sign of your engines/games performance.

Still, Amazon has the money, but no expierience as of yet in the game engine business, and they might have bought one of the worst options to build their own engine on. Especially seeing how brilliant some of the other free or low cost options are.

That was the intent of my question. Why now, why with CryEngine as a base.