14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon took everyone by surprise today and launched its own AAA game engine based on CryEngine that features support for AWS and Twitch.
Amazon is doing all kinds of crazy things, but it's their money, and they can do whatever they want with it, including releasing a full triple A game engine out of the blue. It's not clear how they arrived at the conclusion that this is what they need to be doing, but Amazon is in the business of making money.
To be fair, this wasn't done from scratch, so it's not like Amazon was working on the new Lumberyard engine for years. More likely, they just bought the rights to use the CryEngine from Crytek, along with some support.
Money will be made from multiplayer
Since the poorly-named Lumberyard engine is free, you might wonder how Amazon is going to make money off it. From the looks of it, the engine also uses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the multiplayer component and will charge the studio based on the multiplayer usage. Since there isn't a proper precedent, it's difficult to ascertain if it's going to have any kind of success.
"Amazon Lumberyard is our first step on this road. Starting with proven game and cloud technologies, we have created something new for customers, a game technology that is interwoven with AWS cloud infrastructure and Twitch. Great technology can indeed make things easier, but the complexity of games has grown faster than the ability of technology to simplify the work," Eric Schenk, general manager for Amazon Lumberyard, said.
For now, Lumberyard is a mystery and it will be interesting to see if anyone will pick it up. In any case, unless Amazon has been working on it with some other studio, it will take at least a year to hear the news about any upcoming titles working on this engine.
