AWS for Games Blog
Amazon GameLift announces general availability of six new regions
Today, we’re excited to release an update to Amazon GameLift that increases global coverage for developers, while providing seamless, low-latency gameplay experiences for players worldwide. GameLift, an AWS managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated servers for multiplayer games, enables you as a developer to create a 200+ player battle royale game with Large Match Support or automatically adapt server capacity with player traffic using Autoscaling. With this update, you can place players closer to their actual regional locations with the addition of six new regions (from 15 to 21). Let’s dig in.
Launch dedicated, low-cost game servers in more regions
At the start of 2021, we continued gathering customer feedback to identify the most requested feature updates. At the top of the list was the need for broader reach from increased global coverage, so you can tap into regions where players are located. Now with 60 instance types and 21 regions, you can pick the instance types and geographies best-suited for your game, deliver low latency gameplay, and place players closest to where they are playing to ensure a smooth experience. By popular demand, five of the six new regions are also located in Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA). The six new regions include:
- Europe (Milan, Paris, and Stockholm)
- Africa (Cape Town)
- Middle East (Bahrain)
- Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
Along with adding the new regions, we have also simplified fleet management, speeding up your time to market. To learn more about these new tools, check out this blog post.
“GameLift is already loved by customers for delivering a low cost, reliable player experience,” said Vatsal Bhardwaj, General Manager of AWS Game Tech services. “Since they require more available regions where their players are located to ensure a smooth gameplay, we’re excited to expand our regional reach with six new regions for game developers, all on the global scale of an AWS service.”
For a complete list, GameLift is currently available in these AWS 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.
How Wargaming, GungHo, and others leverage GameLift’s reach
Some of the world’s most successful game companies already trust GameLift for their games, including Wargaming, GungHo (Ninjala), and Ubisoft (For Honor). These are just a few GameLift FleetIQ customer stories today, and we’re excited to share more customer stories throughout the year.
“As part of our partnership with Wargaming to deliver a AAA multiplatform, free-to-play shooter, we want to unify players from all over the world, so providing global availability is in our DNA and is one of our top priorities,” said Sergii Rustamov, Technical Director at FragLab. “That is why Amazon GameLift is one of the top choices for backend servers. GameLift’s architecture makes possible to easily choose servers that are geographically closer to players, and autoscale to meet player demand during peak traffic hours.”
Similarly, Takanori Kikuchi, CTO at GungHo Online Entertainment stated, “At GungHo, our mission is to create the most exciting games on a global scale.” Kikuchi continued, “We constantly evolve our development capabilities and operations to deliver joy and wonder to players without being reliant on hardware or location, and with Amazon GameLift, we can provide smooth gameplay experiences with dedicated game server hosting. In our latest game Ninjala, we’ve seen low rates up to 100ms, and with the new regions, we expect to reduce latency even further with servers closer to our players.”
Getting started with GameLift
As a reminder, in 2020, customers wanted an option to use their existing tools without GameLift’s game server management layer. So, we enabled GameLift FleetIQ and GameLift FlexMatch to do just that, while still experiencing up to 70% cost-savings compared to existing on-premises deployments. Now that 2021 is in full swing, this is just one of our first new releases, so stay tuned for more updates coming throughout the year. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this update and what features you would like to see in the future. Connect with the GameLift team on the forums or through the AWS Game Tech social media channels.