Amazon Games And Netflix Are Developing Games In Unreal Engine

Amazon and Netflix could be developing AAA games on Unreal Engine, according to job postings from both companies. Netflix and Amazon have been building up their own game studios with the intent of developing AAA, multiplatform games. 

Amazon 

A job posting for a Game Engineer at Amazon Games mentions that the company is developing a AAA multiplayer game utilizing the latest Unreal Engine, with a preference for candidates that have experience utilizing the Unreal Engine. 

The game mentioned in the job posting is an unannounced title, developed by veteran developers of other major studios and games. “Our product is an unannounced game built by a team with veterans from many popular titles like Destiny, Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, EverQuest 2, PlanetSide 2, and H1Z1.“

It’s possible that this game is also the live-service multiplayer AAA title in development at Amazon that we reported on a while ago. Both of these job postings are for the San Diego-based studio. This is also the same Amazon Games studio whose head resigned earlier this year. 

But why is Amazon switching to Unreal? The company spent years and millions of dollars developing its own in-house engine, called Lumberyard. The engine underpins its first-party games, such as New World and The Canceled Crucible, and the upcoming games Star Citizen and Squadron 42 from Cloud Imperium Games also use the engine. 

Lumberyard was based on CryEngine, an engine that was primarily built to support small-scale, single-player first-person shooter-type games, and not the large-scale open-world MMO games that Amazon was developing. A game needs to be optimized for the engine it runs on, and things get weird if there’s not a fit. It’s why EA’s old racing games have gun mechanics hidden in because Frostbite was made for FPS. 

Eventually, Amazon would end the development of Lumberyard and hand over development and management to the Linux Foundation, with the new engine being renamed the Open 3D engine. According to former developers, Lumberyard was a nightmare of an engine to develop with, with Amazon Games struggling to develop its multiplayer titles because of technical issues stemming from the engine. 

Amazon is currently planning to publish other games based on Unreal Engine, such as Crystal Dynamics’ upcoming Tomb Raider game. However, that game is a 3rd party title, the game mentioned in the job posting is an in-house first-party title developed by Amazon.  

Netflix

A job posting for a Lead Rendering Engineer mentions that Netflix is developing a brand-new AAA multiplatform game, also mentioning that the game will run on Unreal Engine, and requests candidates that have experience using the Unreal Engine.

We recently reported that Netflix was working on live service games and was building up its own internal AAA game studios. Joseph Staten of 343i, an original HALO developer recently joined Netflix to work on multiplatform games. Netflix currently offers mobile games as part of its subscription but is serious about multiplatform gaming.

Netflix currently has 200 million subscribers, and it is likely they could utilize that massive subscriber base and offer a cloud streaming service similar to Game Pass or Geforce Now included with the Netflix subscription. Whatever the company does in AAA multiplatform gaming, it will for sure dip into its vast base of subscribers.