The move is the latest step by Amazon.com into the realm of video games, an industry revolutionized by the wide availability of broadband, cloud storage and open-source software. By releasing Lumberyard, a free engine that helps craft artificial video game worlds, for use by small studios, Amazon hopes to connect the startup crowd to its Web services platform. Online video game hosting is becoming big business for Amazon and its competitors, with revenue derived from renting computing power and data storage, and Amazon is betting that its game tools will boost its presence in that market, said Patrick Walker, a vice president with Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, a video game industry research group. The Seattle area is also home to Valve, the software maker behind the Source video game engine and the Steam game distribution platform, which Amazon’s retail arm already competes with. “By starting game projects with Amazon Lumberyard, developers are able to spend more of their time creating differentiated gameplay and building communities of fans, and less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building game engine components and managing server infrastructure,” Amazon said. Amazon’s move into video game tools is another example of the company’s interest in advancing beyond just building Internet-based plumbing for developers, and toward creating more advanced building blocks for specific industries.