Amazon's Lumberyard game engine is now open source

Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine is now available as an open source project under the newly organized Open 3D Foundation (O3DE). It's been made open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Amazon announced the move in concert with the other founding members of  O3DE, which include Adobe, Huawei, Niantic and RedHat among its 20 founding members.

The move is being overseen by The Linux Foundation, who is acting in part to “accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology.”

It’s a welcome, though head-scratching new waypoint on Amazon’s oft-waylaid journey into game development. Lumberyard emerged in 2016 as a licensed branched version of CryTek’s CryEngine, and was supposed to be a foundational tool for in-house games built at the studio.

Many of those games have failed to get off the ground for a number of varying reasons, not all tied to the Lumberyard engine.

Amazon’s move here is a boon for anyone interested in developing open-source tools for 3D game engines (that can then be used by game developers), but a bust for anyone financially invested in Lumberyard becoming a competitor to Unity or Unreal Engine.