Amazon announces its free computer game engine Lumberyard

Amazon recently announced its beta release of its new computer game development engine, Amazon Lumberyard. Better yet - it's free!

The cross-platform, 3D game engine will allow both amateur and professional

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to create high-quality games with stunning, visual worlds and intuitive gameplay. Amazon Lumberyard will be free and include the full source code with the only fees coming in the form of AWS services that you can choose to use.

“Many of the world’s most popular games are powered by AWS’s technology infrastructure platform,” said Mike Frazzini, VP of Amazon Games. “When we’ve talked to game developers, they’ve asked for a game engine with the power and capability of leading commercial engines, but that’s significantly less expensive, and deeply integrated with AWS for the back-end and Twitch for the gamer community. We’re excited to deliver that for our game developers today with the launch of Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift.”

The engine is based on Crytek's CryEngine, which Amazon bought the licence for last year and will also employ the use of Twitch.tv, a popular online streaming service that Amazon also acquired in 2014.

Lumberyard is expected to have a big impact in the computer game industry and because it's free it would be a great opportunity for anyone looking for a career in computer game development.