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amazon game engine

Amazon might be known for selling you things, but its cloud services now have just as much of an impact. It already powers many of the most popular apps and websites on the planet, but it's easy to forget that the company has an impressive online gaming presence thanks to Twitch. With its latest announcement, Amazon has decided to combine all of its strengths and unveiled Lumberyard, a new free gaming engine designed to let developers build A+ games and integrate all of its online services at the same time.

Amazon says Lumberyard is built around making games social. The company wants developers to focus on creating unique games that can support huge communities from the beginning, rather than getting bogged down with the complexities of building a custom engine or firefighting server issues. Once signed up, studios gain access to features that let them play around with character animation, camera frameworks, animation and particle editors, audio tools, weather effects and AI elements.

hitman absolution pc 027

Agent 47's next adventure will be released in multiple parts. Today publisher Square Enix announced that the next Hitman game will be a "fully episodic" release, with the first episode of the game, which takes place in Paris, due to launch on March 11th.

An episode set in Italy will follow in April, followed by one in Morocco in May. The company says that it will then deliver regular monthly content updates throughout 2016, including three additional locations: Thailand, America, and Japan. Weekly "live events" will also be released periodically. The first episode will cost $15, while subsequent episodes will be $10 each; alternately you can purchase the whole game up front for $60. A traditional physical release of the game will launch at the end of the year.

ps4 controller

Sony is working on an application to support streaming PlayStation 4 games to Mac OS/Windows PCs, according to PlayStation's president of worldwide studios.
 
Shuhei Yoshida, in a tweet on Thursday, said "we are indeed working on an official application" supporting such a feature. Game-streaming on PlayStation is currently only supported via Remote Play, which transmits games from either the PS4 to the PS Vita. (The PS3 and PSP have also been supported, but Remote Play is standard to any PS4 game.)

sony playstation 4
Sony's PlayStation 4 launched two years ago, one week before its main rival, Microsoft's Xbox One. Since then, the PS4 has been a stunning sales success - at one point last year, it appeared to be outselling the Xbox One by around three-to-one.
 
Microsoft has been closing the gap, with more aggressive pricing and value-added bundles, but today, its chief competitor in the gaming space announced just how many consoles it's sold so far.

Activision Blizzard Candy Crush

Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard has acquired King, the developer behind the popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga, for $5.9 billion. Proclaiming itself as "a new global leader in mobile gaming", King boasts of over half a billion players in 196 countries.