Amazon Opens Lumberyard to Game Devs

Amazon on Tuesday announced that it has widened its footprint in the game industry, complementing its development studio with the Lumberyard 3D game engine.

Based on core components of Crytek’s CryEngine, Lumberyard will support development for PCs and consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4). Amazon plans to add support for mobile devices and virtual reality gear soon.

The game engine, which is available in a beta build, is free of charge, and there is neither a subscription fee nor revenue-sharing model to bar entry to small development teams.

Lumberyard also will grant developers access to its source code and allow them to redistribute it to modders. However, Amazon is reserving its rights to Lumberyard’s core, so it isn’t open source.

The Worksite

Amazon has been active at this worksite for years. That movement included a billion-dollar buyout of video game streaming service Twitch, the formation of Amazon Game Studios, and a reported US$50 million to $70 million to the troubled Crytek in exchange for licensing rights to its CryEngine technology.

There’s also Amazon Web Services, which spokesperson Rena Lunak said has been serving some of the world’s biggest games and studios for years.

“When we talked to these customers, they asked for a powerful game engine that is inexpensive, helps them connect their games to the AWS cloud and to a large and growing community of broadcasters and fans on Twitch,” she told TechNewsWorld. “With Lumberyard, this is what we did. Cloud and community are important aspects of making games.”

To help developers tap into AWS, which is optional, Amazon launched GameLift alongside Lumberyard. GameLift will facilitate the deployment of servers across AWS for multiplayer play.

Amazon is charging its standard fees for AWS and is offering GameLift by the seat, which is priced at $1.50 per every 1,000 active daily users.

“With Amazon Lumberyard, we aim to help developers spend more and more of their time creating differentiated gameplay and building communities of fans, and less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building game engine components and managing server infrastructure,” Lunak said.