Amazon announces its own game engine with built-in Twitch support - CNET

Online retailer Amazon continues its push into gaming today with the announcement of Amazon Lumberyard. It's a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine that the company says is capable of delivering the "highest quality games," featuring "beautiful worlds, realistic characters, and stunning real-time effects."

Lumberyard wasn't the only new gaming tool that Amazon announced today. The company also revealed Amazon GameLift, a program for Lumberyard that aims to allow developers to increase the scale and performance of their online multiplayer games "without any additional engineering effort or upfront costs."

The Lumberyard engine launches today in beta form for PC and console developers. Support for unspecified mobile and virtual reality platforms will come later, the company said.

As you might have assumed, Lumberyard features native Twitch support. Amazon purchased Twitch in 2014 for $1 billion.

The engine also includes a "full-featured editor" and "hundreds" of other elements including cloth physics, character and animation editors, audio tools, weather effects, and vehicle systems. Amazon also noted that Lumberyard developers get full access to the engine's source code.