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Star Citizen to Use Amazon Lumberyard

• Billy Moroney
• December 25th, 2016

Yesterday, on December 23, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) announced that their upcoming and highly anticipated space sims Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will use the Amazon Lumberyard engine.

Amazon’s game engine, Lumberyard, is an impressive free AAA engine that not only allows game designers to design incredibly detailed 3D games (as shown by the immaculate screen shots of both games published so far), but also gives designers access to Amazon’s remarkable AWS Cloud technologies for highly advanced multiplayer support.

In addition to the fact that this partnership reveals that the Amazon Lumberyard engine is able to stand toe-to-toe or even taller than its competitors, it also reveals the social possibilities of CIG’s games. Since Amazon recently partnered with Twitch to provide the Twitch Prime service, Star Citizen and Squadron 42 have the potential to play a huge role in the Twitch and gaming communities at large. Also, Star Citizen is one of the most ambitious crowd-funded products to date, so the widespread support for its full release is already in place.

Chris Roberts, CIG’s CEO and creative director, and Dan Winters, head of business development for Amazon Games, both share their thoughts on the collaboration.

Roberts says that “we’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been lookking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Lumberyard provides ground-breaking technology features for online games, including deep back-end cloud integration on AWS and its social component with Twitch that enables us to easily and instantly connect to millions of global gamers. Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our just-released 2.6 Alpha update for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.”

Winters believes that “Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are incredibly ambitious projects which are only possible with great engine technology paired with the transformative power of the cloud. We love how CIG’s bold vision has already inspired a massive community, and we’re thrilled to see what they create with Lumberyard, AWS, and the Twitch community.”

Cloud Imperium Games and its subsidiary Roberts Space Industries Corp. still want your support, so visit this site to see how you can contribute to the Star Citizen project.