Lumbering Through Amazon: Lumberyard

By Tanner Banks
2/17/2016, 3:00 p.m.
Tweet to: @SirJamtrousers

In case of zombies, break terms of service. There’s been some buzz surrounding the clause in Amazon: Lumberyard’s Terms of Service stating you can ignore it “in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.”

ToS Easter Eggs aside, what does Lumberyard bring to the table that engine juggernauts Unreal 4 and Unity don’t? There’s been a steady stream of hype surrounding classic games like Spyro and Mario redone in the Unreal 4, and some of the biggest indie hits of the past years were built on the Unity engine. (Slender: The Eight Pages, Gang Beasts, and Slime Rancher, to name a few.) Amazon has been pushing to get into the game development world for years, between hosting servers for publishers like Ubisoft, starting Amazon Game Studios, and the recent Lumberyard release, Amazon is officially putting everyone else on notice that a new player has joined the battle.

Lumberyard is being touted as “a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS (Amazon Web Service) and Twitch – with full source.” Keep in mind that Lumberyard isn’t a 100 percent new engine though; it’s a modified version of Crytek’s CryEngine that most likely came from Amazon’s $50-70 million licensing deal. This is hardly a knock on Lumberyard, as the CryEngine has made some of the prettiest games on the market. The announcement trailer showed us some of the potential for the young engine with bright pastel-heavy landscapes, dark and gritty monsters, and cartoony pirates. With a fully open source code available, the amount of plugins and modifications down the road will be able to really stretch Lumberyard to its limits.

But what Amazon is really going to be betting the farm on is the built-in Twitch support features. In 2014 Amazon swooped in underneath YouTube to buy Twitch for $970 million with the Amazon Web Service as an “attractive” aspect of the deal. (They should have asked that extra $30 million dammit!)

Current features include “Twitch ChatPlay” and “Twitch JoinIn.” ChatPlay will allow the viewers to type into the chat to affect the game such as “where spectators can vote on game outcomes, gift power-ups to their favorite players, or change the level based on the number of viewers watching the broadcaster.” This sounds like a chatbot disaster waiting to happen. While it sounds good in theory, Twitch’s comment section has been known to be rather vitriolic at times and this could bring the “chat salt” out of the comment section, and into the game.

JoinIn, on the other hand, sounds absolutely brilliant. Cutting out the middle man and allowing loyal followers to join their favorite streamers in one click in real time will allow the fan-to-streamer interactions to be that much closer. With the streamers in control of the invites and not needing to worry about a barrage of in-game requests, the biggest thing will be making sure the security for the connections is high enough to prevent hackers from compromising the privacy of streamers and watchers.

With Lumberyard still technically in beta, whether the engine becomes a fixture in AAA games like it is predicting remains to be seen. But make no mistake about it, Amazon is serious about being a game company. If you check out their jobs section there are 81 positions open in the studio as of 2/17/2016, so they’re looking to make a talented and large team. Having Twitch in their back pocket gives Amazon access to 100 million unique visitors per month, so advertising won’t be an issue. If Lumberyard can deliver on half of what it’s promising, Amazon might prove that money does grow on trees.