Amazon has unveiled two new products aimed squarely at the professional game-developer fraternity: Lumberyard, a free 3D game engine; and GameLift, a service for quickly building backends for deploying session-based multiplayer games. Products of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) division, Lumberyard and GameLift are aimed at developers building cloud-connected games that can work across multiple platforms.
Available to download in beta today, Lumberyard is a particularly notable move from the Internet giant, as it sees Amazon go up against a number of long-standing incumbents in the game-engine realm, including Unity and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, not to mention more recent entrants such as Autodesk’s Stingray.
GamesBeat