Amazon to launch its own Lumberyard game engine

Amazon has recently launched a brand new game engine for tiple-A games called Lumberyard. Developers can use it for free to create games for PS4, XBox One, PC, mobile devices or even VR. The only problem is that despite no price is charged to download it, developers will still have to pay for Amazon’s web services. That is how the company is going to make some money.

Amazon Lumberyard is a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for you to create the highest-quality games, connect your games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch.

By starting game projects with Lumberyard, you can spend more of your time creating great gameplay and building communities of fans, and less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building a game engine and managing server infrastructure.

Amazon

Developers will be able to develop wonderful single-player titles for free, but if they want multiplayer features, Amazon’s got a price for that. Streaming will be surely connected to Amazon’s own Twitch as developers are not allowed to use rivals’ services and game studious are now allowed to use cloud servers of Microsoft or Google, but is that a potential problem? Twitch, for example, is one of the most profitable ways to stream your games as of today and there is probably no doubt that Amazon servers will be of use to developers.

Lumberyead itself seems to be quite powerful – it is created with the help of CryEngine tools. It is reported that it has all the necessary feautures –  from particle effects and and real-time water dynamics, to “vegetation tools” for super-realistic plants. Lumber looks to be a win-win choice, unless you are against Amazon’s web services. What are your thoughts on new game engine? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: amazon.com