Amazon Has Released Their Free "Lumberyard" Game Engine

A couple of years ago Amazon gathered up a bunch of talented game and engine developers and simply went dark with their final announcement saying that exciting things will be coming in the future.

It would appear that the future is now as Amazon has released a beta version of their free & open-source game engine titled Lumberyard. Its based on CryEngine so expect to see some beautiful games coming out of the woodwork's. Here's the announcement video and a few more details:

The currently available version of Lumberyard supports PC, PS4 and Xbox One development along with full Twitch integration, including things like viewing chat in game and allowing streamers to more easily connect with their viewers. Mobile support is planned for the future but isn't available as of yet.

Where Lumberyard gets really interesting is with the fact that it comes integrated with the rather popular and efficient Amazon Web Services (AWS). This might not sound important but having AWS built into the engine itself will allow developers to easily implement online components, host servers and sort out netcode without much prior knowledge being required. Just to put things in to perspective, many games are already using the AWS service to host their servers so making that process even easier is a tantalizing offer.

Amazon backed Game Engine Lumberyard has some good graphics

Those eyebrows must require hours in front of the mirror

While the Lumberyard engine itself is free you will need to pay for the AWS servers and the GameLift manager which is there to help out with session-based multiplayer games. But rather than an upfront sum the price will be determined by how many resources the game uses so small indie developers can expect to pay a lot less than big companies with multiplayer titles.

There is of course also the option of building and hosting your own multiplayer service with Lumberyard simply being the foundation but that seems like a strange choice if you already went with an Amazon backed engine.

Lumberyard is still in beta testing but it does have a good amount of tutorials surrounding it so if you feel like messing around with a new engine there your chance.