Amazon has steadily been making inroads into the gaming space in the last couple of years. Now, they’ve announced Lumberyard, a free 3D game engine. Lumberyard can be used to develop for PC and consoles, but thats not the only thing that makes it so interesting. Capitalizing on the acquisition of Twitch, Amazon has built Twitch tools directly into the engine, allowing developers to more easily integrate Twitch features and connectivity.

Lumberyard is free to download- Amazon plans to make all money off of  multiplayer features and web services supporting the games. To that end, Lumberyard, which is currently in beta, is being rolled out alongside a multiplayer service called GameLift. GameLife has a $1.50 per 1,000 daily active user fee plus any other standard fees for Amazon Web Services that may be used. GameLife is billed as a convenient way of including and deploying multiplayer features. Since these features are normally out of range for smaller developers, this should allow developers to include features they might otherwise cut.

Other tools in Lumberyard also include Twitch ChatPlay, which will allow viewers to use Twitch chat to control the game- basically it’s baked in “Twitch Plays” support. And they also have a feature called Twitch JoinIn that will allow broadcasters to invite audience members into their games.

With Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 having royalty and licensing fees if a project launches, having a solution that could be potentially 100% free if you don’t use Amazon’s web services, Lumberyard is certainly looking like it might shake up the existing development space for a lot of developers. Of course, we’ll need to see how the first Lumberyard developed games fare, but seeing some diversity in the game engine market certainly can’t be a bad thing.

Check out Amazon’s Lumberyard announcment video below: