Tuesday March 19th, 2024
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Amazon Releases AAA Game Engine For Free

The new Lumberyard game engine promises to turn the industry on its head, from indie developers to big studios.

Staff Writer
After Amazon’s multimillion-dollar deal to license the Cryengine last year from the desperate developers of Far Cry and Crysis, the internet was buzzing with speculation as to what the world's biggest online retailer had in store. Amazon has demonstrated its intent to make waves in the world of gaming by creating its own game studio and releasing its Apple-TV-like streaming box with support for a game controller. And after purchasing live-streaming juggernaut Twitch for almost $1 billion it was clear that Amazon was going to be entering the gaming world in a big way. Those plans became a lot clearer last week when the company made the industry shattering announcement of its new Lumberyard engine.
 
Lumberyard is an AAA 3D game development engine from Amazon allowing for the development of high quality, cross-platform games which is fully integrated with Twitch and AWS cloud. Oh yeah, and did we mention it’s totally free? 
 
Gunfire Studios is one of the first studios to work with Amazon. 
 
It's competing with big names in game development like Unity, and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine but since all the other big name game developments charge for a license or royalty fees, Amazon has a huge edge. What this means is that basically any team in the world with sufficiently powerful PCs, an idea, and the time to make it a reality can build games to rival those of developers with millions of dollars and huge teams. 
 
“Games are becoming the leading form of entertainment. Over a long arc of time, everyone will be a gamer of one kind or another,” says Eric Schenk, General Manager for Lumberyard in an interview with Venturebeat. This is evident in our everyday lives. People who would don’t really know the term gamer can be seen frantically swiping at coloured dots on their smartphones as they wait for the metro. Let's see what the people of Egypt can make with this epic tool. Our vote is for an action game in the style of Sony’s God of War but instead of those puny Greeks, set in ancient Egypt.