Amazon reveals a free game engine called Lumberyard

Amazon announces the availability of Lumberyard, a cross-platform 3D game engine with full source code access, and Cloud and Twitch integration. The engine is based on Crytek's CryENGINE and is free to use, there are no subscription or license fees, you only pay the default fees for the Amazon Web Services services you choose to use. You can check it out or download it over here.

Amazon Lumberyard is the only game engine that gives you a combination of free, feature-rich development technology, native integration to the AWS Cloud to make it easier to create live and multiplayer games, and native integration of Twitch features that help you connect games to the world’s leading social video platform and community for gamers.

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

Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source code provided. Whether you are a major studio, an indie developer, a student, or a hobbyist, Lumberyard provides a growing set of tools to create the highest-quality games, connect your games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch.

Lumberyard helps developers build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects. With Lumberyard’s visual scripting tool, even non-technical game developers can add cloud-connected features to a game in minutes (such as a community news feed, daily gifts, or server-side combat resolution) through a drag-and-drop GUI interface. Lumberyard is also integrated with Amazon GameLift, a new AWS service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer games.

With Amazon GameLift, Amazon Lumberyard developers can quickly scale high-performance game servers up and down to meet player demand, without any additional engineering effort or upfront costs.

Amazon Lumberyard is free, and available in beta for developers building PC and console games, with mobile and virtual reality (VR) platforms coming soon. With Amazon Lumberyard, developers only pay standard AWS fees for the AWS services they choose to use. With Amazon GameLift, you simply pay for the standard AWS fees for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and data transfer you actually use, plus a small fee per Daily Active User.