Need Help Creating a Game? Try Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon today launched a free, cross-platform 3D game engine, supported by AWS Cloud and Twitch.

Amazon Lumberyard aims to help developers—from novice to professional—create high-quality games.

The Web giant also announced Amazon GameLift, a new service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer titles. When used with Lumberyard, developers can easily scale servers up or down to meet player demand.



Many popular titles are already powered by Amazon Web Services, according to Mike Frazzini, vice president of Amazon Games. So Lumberyard was pretty much a no-brainer.

"When we've talked to game developers, they've asked for a game engine with the power and capability of leading commercial engines, but [which is] significantly less expensive, and deeply integrated with AWS for the back-end and Twitch for the gamer community," Frazzini said in a statement.

Building high-quality games is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive: Developers either spend years creating 20-plus components, or invest in costly commercial game engines. Add to that the hours it takes to build and manage the back-end infrastructure needed to connect games to the cloud and support high volumes of player traffic.

So Amazon is offering what it calls "the only game engine" to give developers free, feature-rich technology and native integration with the AWS Cloud and Twitch.


A subsidiary of Amazon, Twitch's streaming video platform has more than 1.7 million monthly broadcasters and reaches 100 million-plus monthly viewers. Using Lumberyard's Twitch ChatPlay, developers can tap into that massive audience, allowing folks to interact with games via chat commands.

Amazon GameLift, meanwhile, shows developers real-time game server capacity and player demand, and lets them create multiplayer back-ends with less effort, risk, and delays.

The free Amazon Lumberyard is available today in beta for PC and console developers; mobile and virtual reality platforms are coming soon. GameLift requires a "small" per-player fee.