Amazon Reveals Game Engine With Native Twitch Support
Amazon is evidently getting more serious about gaming, following an announcement of a free, cross-platform 3D game engine called Amazon Lumberyard.
The new engine launched a beta today for console and PC developers, with plans to add mobile and virtual reality support later. Lumberyard includes “hundreds” of the elements that developers need when creating a game including cloth physics, audio tool, character and animation editors, weather effects, vehicle systems and a full-featured editor.
Unsurprisingly, Lumberyard will also have native Twitch support included. Amazon forked over $1 billion back in 2014 for the streaming platform.
“By starting game projects with Amazon Lumberyard, developers are able to spend more of their time creating differentiated gameplay and building communities of fans, and less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building game engine components and managing server infrastructure,” Amazon said in a statement.
Lumberyard wasn’t the only gaming announcement that Amazon made today. They also revealing Amazon GameLift, a program for Lumberyard that allows developers to increase the scale and performance of their multiplayer games.
Though Lumberyard is toted as a free service for developers that isn’t entirely true. In order for said developers to use the engine they need to pay the Amazon Web Services fee. Amazon GameLift includes a per-player fee which is $1.50 for 1,000 daily active users.
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