Fast, Fun and Full Games with Backfill Functionality for FlexMatch

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Developing, deploying and managing multiplayer games presents many complex challenges when it comes to creating competitive matches for players around the world. Your players expect low latency experiences, fun gameplay, short wait times and few interruptions once the game is up and running. Today we’re adding backfill capabilities to FlexMatch, our matchmaking system, to improve your players’ experience.

Matchmaking, your way

With Amazon GameLift’s FlexMatch, you can create a powerful matchmaking system that enables you to match players together based on rules you define. Whether you choose to build your matches based on player skill, latency, or some other custom criteria, FlexMatch allows you to build robust and flexible matchmaking pipelines to suit your desired gaming experience.

FlexMatch automatically routes grouped players into a game session queue, which places the match in the AWS region that best balances low player latency and high server utilization. To ensure players are efficiently placed into game sessions, you can also configure FlexMatch to automatically expand matching criteria if wait time crosses a custom threshold so that players can quickly join the next best game.

Forever full games with backfill functionality for FlexMatch

Depending on your game and your chosen matchmaking system, keeping a game in play after a player quits or disconnects may not always be as easy as simply adding the next available player. So how can you continue to provide a great player experience after players drop in and out of gameplay?

Today, we extend FlexMatch further, adding new backfill capabilities that automatically find players to join a game session that is already in progress, using the same custom criteria used to populate the original game session. This ensures that when a player drops from an existing multiplayer session, you can backfill the empty slot with the most appropriate new player for that match.

If you’re just getting started with FlexMatch, be sure to check out our matchmaking introduction here.