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.
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.
Read more: The new Hitman game will be released as a series of episodes
Read more: Sony announces over 30 million PlayStation 4 sales
Read more: Activision Blizzard buys Candy Crush Saga developer King for a whopping $5.9 billion