Star Citizen Ditches CryEngine for Amazon Lumberyard

Star Citizen, the vast, ambitious space sim from Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts, has abandoned the CryEngine, four years into the game’s development. Instead, the game will now utilise Amazon’s Lumberyard engine, supported by the Amazon Web Services Cloud, Roberts’ Cloud Imperium Games has announced.

“We’ve been working with Amazon for more than a year, as we have been looking for a technology leader to partner with for the long term future of Star Citizen and Squadron 42,” Roberts said. “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.”

“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,” Dan Winters, head of business development for Amazon Games, explained. “We’re excited that they’ve chosen Lumberyard and AWS to provide the performance and scalability they need to bring their games to a massive audience.”

“We are delighted to be working with a partner with the strength, vision, and resources of Amazon Web Services,” Roberts added. “We are looking forward to developing our relationship with AWS and the Lumberyard community in the future.”

CryEngine was developed by Crytek, a company which has hanging on for dear life for the past few months: after reports that it had been late to pay its staff over the last few months, Crytek announced that it was closing all but two of its studios and binning all but its most profitable IPs.