Last year we witnessed a pretty mysterious deal go down between Amazon and Crytek. Crytek was in a little bit of financial trouble, and Amazon ended up spending tens of millions on a licensing deal, giving it access to CryEngine. No one knew what Amazon was going to do with CryEngine until today. It seems Amazon has been hard at work on its own 3D game engine called Lumberyard, which is now available for free . Watch out, Unity and Unreal Engine, Lumberyard is technically still in beta, but it shows huge promise. It’s a beautiful kind of Frankenstein’s monster, being a “blend of new and proven technologies from CryEngine, Double Helix, and AWS (Amazon Web Services).”
Amazon may be a new player in the game, but keep in mind that Amazon owns Twitch, owns Double Helix (the team behind the new Killer Instinct ), and it has the power of GameLift, which will use AWS for building backends for multiplayer games. Although Lumberyard is being distributed for free, developers will pay a fee to use Amazon’s GameLift services. It’s really fair, though: something like $1.50 per 1000 average daily users. For more of the technical mumbo jumbo that went way over my head and details on Twitch integration, check out the announcement video right here: