Amazon’s most noteworthy gaming initiative started in 2015, when it spent a reported $50 million to $70 million to license the CryEngine, a middling independent game engine owned by CryTek, the publisher behind the game Far Cry. Over the next few years, Amazon invested hundreds of millions transforming CryEngine into Lumberyard, a would-be competitor to Unreal and Unity, albeit one optimized for AWS.
