Star Citizen the ambitious crowd sourced multi-genre spaceship simulator under development at Cloud Imperium Games has made the switch from Crytek’s CryEngine to the Amazon.com developed Lumberyard  engine.

Lumberyard is a freely distributed fork of CryEngine that provides developers with the graphical capabilities and networking code to produce everything from indie to AAA titles. In addition to the graphical prowess of that CryEngine is known for, Lumberyard also allows devs to use Twitch.TV and Amazon Web Services (AWS) within the game engine itself. It is no wonder that Cloud Imperium was able to make the engine switch over the last 12 months without alarming the community.

Speaking about the switch to Lumberyard, Cloud Imperium Games’ Chris 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.”

News about Cloud Imperiums’ switch to Lumberyard comes amidst news that Crytek Corporate would cease all studio operations save for two – their headquarters in Frankfurt Germany and one satellite studio in Kiev, Ukraine. This leaves the fate of Crytek’s expansion studios in Turkey, Bulgaria, South Korea and China facing an uncertain fate.

Star Citizen‘s recent 2.6 Alpha Update which includes the brand new FPS deathmatch mode is actually running on Amazon Lumberyard, marking the first major release from Cloud Imperium to do so.