Amazon has released its own free and open-source game engine

Last year, Kotaku reported that Amazon brought Crytek back from the brink of death in a $50 to $70 million licensing deal involving Crytek proprietary CryEngine technology. As interesting and surprising as the report was, most people ended up forgetting all about it, but Amazon decided to give us a bit of reminder on Tuesday by announcing something called Lumberyard, a free and open-source game engine that uses both CryEngine for graphics. The service also uses a new AWS service called GameLift, which allows developers to make use of Amazon’s own cloud platform for their games.