Amazon is getting serious about expanding its presence in the gaming world, and the e-commerce giant announced today that it will be releasing its own free game engine called Lumberyard.

According to Eric Schenk, General Manager for Amazon Lumberyard, the new Lumberyard game engine is designed to support full AAA game development.

“Great technology can indeed make things easier, but the complexity of games has grown faster than the ability of technology to simplify the work,” Schenk said in a blog post. “At Amazon, we believe it should be possible to make great tools and technology that can simplify development for everyone. And beyond just making game development easier, our hope is to prepare developers for the future of games.”

“We are witnessing the rise of gaming as the most pervasive form of entertainment in the world, the availability of mass communication binding people together in global communities via services like Twitch, and the massive increase in the availability of both personal computing devices and public cloud infrastructure. At Amazon, we believe these trends point to an exciting future where billions of customers view, play, and share experiences that were previously impossible to create.”

According to Schenk, Lumberyard will take advantage of Amazon’s own technology by offering native support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twitch livestreaming.

Perhaps even more importantly, developers who use Lumberyard get full access to the engine’s source code.

Lumberyard is free, AWS is not

Lumberyard’s two major competitors in the game engine space are Unity 3D and Unreal Engine 4, both of which are also free to use.

Unlike those other two game engines, however, Lumberyard does not require royalties or equity from successful games made with the engine. According to Amazon, there are no fees, subscriptions, or revenue payouts required to use Lumberyard.

“Lumberyard is free, including source,” Amazon said on the Lumberyard FAQ. “We make money when you use other AWS services. We built Lumberyard to make it faster and easier to build fantastic live, multiplayer, community-driven games – which naturally connect to the cloud to provide these features to players.”

Amazon noted that there is no requirement for Lumberyard games to actually use AWS, so it is still entirely possible to develop games for no cost with Lumberyard.

Photo by auntjojo