Amazon presents Lumberyard, its free 3D game engine

After entering the video game market with its own digital platform and acquiring high-profile gaming studios such as Double Helix, Amazon is further expanding its presence in the field by offering up its own 3D game engine.

The name of the newly announced technology is Lumberyard, and it's being described as a free cross-platform software with both Amazon Web Services and Twitch integration.

According to the official description, Lumberyard intends to be both powerful and user friendly, as it's a "3D game engine for developers to create the highest-quality games, connect their games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. Amazon Lumberyard helps developers build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects.

"With Amazon Lumberyard's visual scripting tool, even non-technical game developers can add cloud-connected features to a game in minutes (such as a community news feed, daily gifts, or server-side combat resolution) through a drag-and-drop graphical user interface."

With this move, Amazon enters an already competitive space with the established players such as Unity and Unreal Engine.

A beta version of Amazon Lumberyard is already available for both PC and console developers, with Virtual Reality and mobile device support being added soon. Here's a couple of screenshots from demos created with this new set of dev tools: