Amazon Unveils Free Game Engine for PC, Mobile and Consoles

Amazon has been fairly vocal about efforts to get into the game industry. They’ve taken previous action to gain a foothold, with the company dropping a large sum to license out Crytek’s Cryengine last year. The company announced and released two new free tools for game developers, that include cloud-driven multiplayer server support.

A new 3D game engine was announced called “The Lumberyard.” This engine is compatible with PC, mobile devices, game consoles and even VR headsets. It’s also designed with direct integration of Amazon’s cloud services and Twitch, which Amazon acquired for just under $1 billion in August 2014.

The Twitch functions are supposed to make interactions easier between audiences and gameplay. Developers will also have the ability to include options that invite viewers into multiplayer games.

Amazon also announced the GameLift service today, which is supposed to support and scale multiplayer games. Here’s Amazon’s description of the service,

“Using Amazon GameLift, a new AWS service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer games, you can quickly scale high-performance game servers up and down to meet player demand, without any additional engineering effort or upfront costs.”

The 3D Lumberyard engine is free, and fees lie in per-player costs you have for GameLift and any kind of Cloud-based needs you have for Lumberyard.

Head over to Amazon’s official site for more information on Lumberyard and GameLift. The video featured below shows Gunfire Games explaining how they experimented with the engine. The studio is currently developing Chronos for Oculus Rift.

What do you think about Amazon’s newest foray into gaming? Do you think the Lumberyard engine will take off?

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