Like is there a special advantage for lumberyard renderer when compared to UE4 which can justify anyone using it instead of UE4.

CE was intended to have only dynamic lighting, while UE used mainly baked lighting.

I don't know if CE supports baked lighting nowadays, but if not this point might be the most important.

So tl;dr, if you're planning to pay yourself a full time gamedev wage, the difference between Lumberyard and Unreal is ~$300/month :lol:

I agree, however you should factor in the value in productivity gained from using the engine, plus the small army of developers already skilled in the engine that you can potentially tap into (note that lumberyard and for the most part cryengine do not have this large, established userbase to recruit from ...yet :rolleyes:).

That $300 may be worth it to you, if you'd have spent more than that $300 of time and/or budget per month making something comparable to UE4 and constantly enhancing and maintaing that code as the industry changes. As UE4 has millions of man-years of development behind it, chances are this is a reasonable trade-off unless you're an AAA studio with the budget to write your own engine.

Just my own personal experience and 0.02p.

So tl;dr, if you're planning to pay yourself a full time gamedev wage, the difference between Lumberyard and Unreal is ~$300/month

Well if you put it that way maybe the price should be considered, if you feel that a good interface and user base isn't worth $300 or more then using Lumberyard is the better deal.

I Downloaded Lumberyard again, a pain as it is huge and there are a few hoops you have to jump before it runs, just to see how it is again, underneath it has almost everything Unreal has, I would go so far as to say that they are infact on par with each other.

The size is annoyingly large Unreal is >15 GB and Lumberyard is > 40 GB Most of that is pre-made assets that will be great for testing; but developers never use these for there actual games just as no artist sells a model with the 3ds max pre-made materials attach.

Underneath it has most of the same things Unreal does, there is nothing that I feel justifies switching.

Digital retailers typically take about 30%

How is that not considered theft, 30% for retailers 30% for tax, you get less than half of the money you earned.

As a artist our retailers gets a 10% cut, even then we consider it too much.

How is that not considered theft

Doesn't matter what you consider it, since you can't really change it. You can distribute for free via itch.io or similar but the value of the stores (physical and digital) is as much about exposure as it is about anything else.

So tl;dr, if you're planning to pay yourself a full time gamedev wage, the difference between Lumberyard and Unreal is ~$300/month

Well if you put it that way maybe the price should be considered, if you feel that a good interface and user base isn't worth $300 or more then using Lumberyard is the better deal.

I Downloaded Lumberyard again, a pain as it is huge and there are a few hoops you have to jump before it runs, just to see how it is again, underneath it has almost everything Unreal has, I would go so far as to say that they are infact on par with each other.

The size is annoyingly large Unreal is >15 GB and Lumberyard is > 40 GB Most of that is pre-made assets that will be great for testing; but developers never use these for there actual games just as no artist sells a model with the 3ds max pre-made materials attach.

Underneath it has most of the same things Unreal does, there is nothing that I feel justifies switching.

Digital retailers typically take about 30%

How is that not considered theft, 30% for retailers 30% for tax, you get less than half of the money you earned.

As a artist our retailers gets a 10% cut, even then we consider it too much.

What I see is that lumberyard and UE4 are nearly same under the hood , but the Edge Ue4 has is it takes 100x less effort than Lumberyard or CE to get the same thing done. For example the animation system in UE4 . Also CE and lumberyard are less performant than Ue4.

Also Lumberyard seems to be taking a direction to improve its usability and toolset, while CE5 is still focusing majorly on Graphics performance.

The one edge I see here is that rendering of hard metallic surfaces seems a bit better in CE/Lumberyard while everything inherently looks plastic or teflon in UE4. But again that depends on the assets and how they're used.

Does anyone thinks that CE/Lumberyard being a forward renderer has some advantage?

Careful on saying 'free' for any engine - especially Lumberyard. If you host on AWS, you better have in-game purchases designed into the game because you will need serious cash to keep it online if it's successful. There is a free tier on AWS, but that will probably support 2 or 3 people playing online to test it. If you're true MMO with 2000+ concurrent users, you're in for a world of hurt when the massive bill comes. Now, keep in mind, a company like Supercell made $924M in profits on $2.3B (yes, B is for Billion) in revenue in 2015 on just 3 games. They can afford the infrastructure to support the game. If you are not immediately making sales, stay on a hard server ISP rental until you get going. If your app flies, you will not be able to exist without AWS cloud services - nothing can scale like they have proven they can.