Posted On: Mar 30, 2021

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Queue notifications for Amazon GameLift. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Wargaming, Ubisoft, and more, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this new update, you as a game developer can now receive automatic notifications when changes take place to the state of your player queues on GameLift.

In multiplayer games, you need to keep a pulse on the players waiting in line for a new game to start. That way, you can ensure there are a healthy stream of players who are then placed into the lowest latency game. Currently, if you are using Queues as part of your game server backend, you must setup an API polling mechanism that notifies you when there are changes to your player queues, which can be error prone, complicated, and might also lead to throttling during peak player traffic. With this update, we’ve added some new functionality that makes it easier for you to:

  • Provide a reliable way to handle queue state changes. Receive automatic notifications when your Queue event statuses change.
  • Streamline backend development. Once a Queue notification is activated, you can subscribe to notifications on Queue changes, eliminating the need to develop an API polling mechanism.
  • Benefit from a trusted service. If you use GameLift’s matchmaker, FlexMatch, you would already be familiar with notifications, and this update brings the same capability to GameLift Queues. You can create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to receive event messaging, or setup event tracking using Amazon CloudWatch Events.

As a reminder, GameLift is available in 21 public Regions: US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, and Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (São Paulo), and China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet.

To learn more about GameLift, visit the product page or Queue notification documentation.