Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Amazon releases free game engine – embarking on a tough market – IDG.se

Amazon investing heavily to break into the gaming industry. Technology Giant has announced two new free developer products: game engine Lumberyard and Game Platform is a system for building online services.

Lumberyard is a 3D engine built on CryENGINE, like Amazon reportedly spent hundreds of million on to license last year. It has support for PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4, and Amazon promises to add mobile devices and virtual reality on the list in the coming months.

But Amazon is hardly alone in making game engines. Industry veteran Tommy Palm, now founder and CEO of games company Resolution Games, says that Amazon has a tough job ahead of them.

Read also: here gaming industry won the war? The pirates can not crack the big games anymore

 
 

Tommy Palm
Tommy Palm, Swedish gaming veteran, now working on the resolution games.



 - There are two very strong game engines on the market in Unity 3D and the Unreal Engine, and there is a wealth of good resources built around them. It is difficult to try muskla into this kind of stage if no niches, he says to Computer Sweden.

 

 Such a niche could be the Amazon Web Services huge selection of online services. We play more and more against and with each other, but the game developers’ toolkit has not evolved at the same pace.

 

 - Game will continue to be more social, but there are still needed done a lot to make it easier for game developers. It is almost nearly as complex today as it was fifteen years ago, says Tommy Palm.

 

 Game Platform, launched together with Lumberyard, is supposed to solve that problem. The service lets developers lay out the online features of Amazon’s cloud, but is initially only in the US.

 

 - It could be an interesting angle of attack as they could differentiate themselves from the others. Amazon has very many skilled technicians who can hopefully facilitate the online services for game developers, says Tommy Palm.

Read also: Mobile Gaming Pioneer does not regret his defection from King
 

 In addition to support for cloud services, Amazon, unsurprisingly, to build support for their own streaming site Twitch. It will be easy for the flowing their game sessions to integrate various social functions that allow viewers to vote on what the player should make the decision.

 

 Although Lumberyard is free, and Amazon do not require a percentage of the profits, there are plenty of caveats. The source code may not be shared anyway, the game can only be posted on their own servers or from AWS, not the third party, and Game Platforms costs money depending on how many players connect to the server.

LikeTweet

No comments:

Post a Comment