Inside Amazon’s decision to make a video game engine

Amazon launched its Lumberyard video game engine this week, showing its intentions to become a much bigger platform company in the games business. To date, Amazon has shown it wants to compete against the likes of Apple and Google with its own game app store, and it has its own game studios making mobile games and material for the Fire TV settop box. It also bought Twitch for $970 million to enter the gameplay livestreaming business in competition with the likes of YouTube.

But now Amazon is going further into the fabric of the game business with the Lumberyard game engine, competing against Unity, Epic Games’Unreal Engine, Autodesk’s Stingray, and others. The Lumberyard engine shows that the company has been thinking about this for some time. It already runs its Amazon Web Services backend infrastructure for a huge game developer community. It also bought engine technology when it acquired the Double Helix game studio in 2014. Then last year, Amazon secretly paid $50 million to get a license for Crytek’s CryEngine technology. That latter move gave Amazon access to high-end 3D game engine technology that’s suitable for building blockbuster games (what the industry refers to as “triple-A” development). Twitch services are also being tied into Lumberyard. It’s a big chess move in the platform wars, and not all of it is clear yet.