Amazon Lumberyard is dead, long live the permissively licensed Open 3D Engine
Amazon is abandoning its Lumberyard 3D engine project before it even leaves beta, but in a way that means it could live on for years to come: it's donating it to the newly formed Open 3D Foundation for release and continued development under a permissive open-source licence.
Amazon launched Lumberyard in beta five years ago as a free-to-use 3D engine and development platform building on Crytek's CryEngine. The catch: signing up to build your game or software in Lumberyard came with an agreement that you would only use Amazon's cloud services, and nobody else's – bringing in a nice batch of recurring revenue for the company.
At least, that was the theory. Lumberyard saw stiff competition from Epic's Unreal Engine and the ever-popular Unity engine, among others, and within a year even Amazon was building projects on something else. The company even found itself competing with CryEngine, Crytek having spent the time since Lumberyard's launch making its own engine pay-what-you-want.
Now, despite a high-profile but questionable win in having troubled crowdfunding money-vacuum Star Citizen to switch to Lumberyard, Amazon's looking to concentrate on other things. Lumberyard, then, is no more – but lives on as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), donated to the newly formed Open 3D Foundation under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.
