Amazon’s Lumberyard.

If you didn’t know Amazon recently released a free AAA game engine called LumberYard. They describe it as:

A free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for you to create the highest-quality games, connect your games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch.

This comes at an interesting time for anyone who’s keeping up to date with the gaming industry, Back in 2014 Amazon acquired Twitch for $970m (£585m) and they also “Rescued” Crytek from financial struggles. Amazon then went after “Double Helix games” in 2014 supposedly for their networking code

Currently Lumberyard is heavily based of the Crytek engine but they have said that they’ll diverge paths and develop lumberyards own tool set separately, meaning that very soon we could see two completely different engines but it is open source allowing for developers to take the engine and tweak it to suit specific needs.

The engine does however come as a catch if you want to use any third party servers they must be amazon web services but they also state in their FAQ there’s nothing wrong with setting up your own servers to run whatever you want to run and of course there is always a purely single player or local multiplayer experience.

Though to sweeten the deal as if a triple A engine wasn't enough Amazon have signed a deal with Microsoft and Sony allowing users to make games for the PS4 and the Xbox1 with Lumberyard.

But what does this mean overall?

Well it really means more indie developers will be able to make games the engine is of triple A quality but we’d need to wait to see if what comes out of the Lumber yard is wood shavings or wood sculptures.