Amazon is making its Lumberyard game engine open source, rebranding as Open 3D Engine

Amazon has announced that it is transforming its Lumberyard game engine into an open source 3D game creation engine with contributions from 20 companies.

Announced via the company's AWS blog, the Open 3D Engine (O3DE for short) will be supervised by the Linux Foundation and uses Lumberyard as its foundation. Some of the other companies involved in growing O3DE include Adobe, Huawei, Niantic, and Red Hat. As its name and nature suggest, developers can use O3DE without fear of needing to pay royalties or other service fees. Lumberyard serves as the foundation using the Apache 2.0 open source license.

Originally licensed from Crytek's CRYENGINE back in 2016, Amazon has assured that O3DE is "unencumbered by any intellectual property rights" from Lumberyard's origin. Currently, the engine supports PC, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, and Android, but dedicated gaming platforms such as PlayStation, Xbox, and the Nintendo Switch will also be on the cards, as well as VR support.

The Open 3D Engine is available to fork from GitHub via o3de.org. The site also includes a setup guide for aspiring users to get started.

Further coverage: AWS Game Tech Blog VentureBeat Engadget