Blog Authors: David Holladay - AWS Game Tech Head of PMM & Ryan Greene - AWS Game Tech Sr. PMM

This blog post presents data and findings from an annual survey of professional video game developers conducted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) during October and November, 2022, alongside details about new AWS for Games solutions and customer stories.

Highlights

• 75% of developers view the cloud as pivotal to their success in 2023
• Announced today, AWS for Games adds eight new services and solutions for game developers
• Amazon GameLift now enables customers to manage game servers hosted in the cloud or on-premises
• Amazon GameSparks is now available in preview in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region

The video game industry continued its rapid transformation in 2022. New players were added across every region of the world, studios were launched and acquired, and developers continued to build and deliver groundbreaking game experiences to more than 3 billion global gamers. To understand what is top of mind for 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) surveyed a broad cross section of the game development community to learn what technical and business issues they viewed as most critical to their success in the coming year. The responses represent a diverse set of developers – they work for small studios with less than 20 people (58%), medium studios of up to 150 people (26%), and large studios of over 150 people (16%) that develop games across 22 genres including action (33%), role playing (30%), and puzzle (22%). The top of mind issues highlighted in this blog post provide insights into how game developers of all sizes and types are thinking about the future of their workforce, game infrastructure and operations, game experiences, and player communities and how the majority (75%) are looking to the cloud to as their solution of choice.

Earlier this year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced AWS for Games – a portfolio of 20 purpose-built solutions and services to help game developers build, run, and grow their games, reaching players all over the world. Since then we’ve continued to listen and receive feedback from developers of all sizes, and today we are excited to announce eight new and enhanced new AWS for Games solutions across cloud game development, game servers, live operations, game analytics, and game artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

55% of developers from our survey said supporting a permanently remote workforce was somewhat or very important in 2023, compared to only 12% of developers who said it was very important to get employees back in the office. Like many other industry professionals, video game developers want more flexibility over where and how they do their work. This response indicates that remote game development is here to stay and likely to increase as studios continue to migrate game production into the cloud. The challenge is that remote teams need as much, if not more, support as those in an office. Game development teams need scalable pipelines to build, test, and publish game builds on time and under budget. Content producers need virtual workstations that make it easy for them to create and contribute to the development tool workflows. All development teams need a single source of truth to share, collaborate, and iterate on digital assets. Cloud game development solutions help game developers migrate their workloads to the cloud and enable a distributed workforce.

AWS for Games Solutions

• Build Pipelines: Unity Build Pipeline, Game Production in the Cloud – CI/CD, Nasuni, Incredibuild*, JFrog Artifactory Cloud
• Version Control: Distributed Perforce Architecture, Perforce HelixCore
• Workstations: Amazon Nimble Studio, Game Production in the Cloud – Workstations, Parsec, Unreal Engine*

*New solutions

New AWS partner solutions are available for Build Pipelines and Workstations use cases. Incredibuild’s solution gives game developers and DevOps managers a smart, scalable platform to continuously build, improve, and release their games.

Evercore Heroes, developed and published by Vela Games

“We wanted to improve build times to be able to iterate faster and not have developers waiting on a pipeline to run for an hour just to test the game,” says Esteban Garcia, Senior Infrastructure Engineer for platform engineering at Vela Games, “Amazon FSx is one of the main components that make this pipeline work.” With AWS, Vela reduced its total build time from an average of 56 minutes to 24 minutes.

90% of developers surveyed said being able to scale their game is an important technical issue to solve for in 2023. Studios only get one shot at launching a game, which makes it particularly challenging to manage. Game servers need to scale with unpredictable and fluctuating player demand. Servers need to be close to players to reduce latency and improve gameplay. All of this must be managed as efficiently as possible to control the cost of running the game. Game Servers solutions help developers efficiently manage highly variable global game traffic for session-based games.

AWS for Games Solutions

• Game Infrastructure: Amazon GameLift*, Multiplayer Session-based Game Hosting*, GameLift Testing Toolkit on AWS*

*New solutions

Two new features were announced for Amazon GameLift – support for AWS Local Zones to increase low-latency server coverage into eight new Local Zones and GameLift Anywhere to help developers who have existing on-premises capacity build hybrid deployments with the cloud to efficiently manage spikes in demand.

Multiplayer Session-based Game Hosting guidance helps developers start multiplayer game development quickly by using serverless and fully managed AWS services to host game backends and servers. GameLift Testing Toolkit automatically detects GameLift deployments, and provides a real-time view of player activity, letting users trial different designs, and quickly identify bugs and inefficiencies.

MARVEL SNAP, developed by Second Dinner and published by Nuverse

“It was a no brainer for us to work with AWS to fully manage the backend infrastructure for MARVEL SNAP. We closely partnered with the AWS for Games team to make this a smooth launch and help us quickly scale to the amount of players we have in the game today. We are excited to keep working with AWS in the future,” Ben Brode Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer, Second Dinner.

91% of developers said finding innovative ways to improve game play experience remained a priority for 2023. This means releasing new experiences while minimizing or quickly addressing negative ones. This requires developers to continuously build, test, and deploy new game functionality, while maintaining a stable player experience, and efficiently scaling to meet player demand. Live Operations solutions help developers manage their backend infrastructure so they can focus on providing players with a high-quality game experience.

AWS for Games Solutions

• Game Services: Amazon GameSparks*, Serverless Notifications for Mobile Games, Massive Scale Real-Time Messaging for Multiplayer Games, Nakama, Beamable

*New solutions

Amazon GameSparks, introduced in preview in March 2022, provides game developers with features for building, running, and scaling the backend for their games. It is now available in preview in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region.

Total War: Warhammer III, developed by Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive, published by Feral Interactive, SEGA, and SEGA of America

“Using Amazon DynamoDB, we can write our data to it and save it with ease,” Seb Maynard, technical director of live services at Creative Assembly (CA). “We don’t have to think about or worry about it. The solution makes things easier for our teams.” Alongside DynamoDB, CA uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, which easily streams data at virtually any scale. “Kinesis Data Streams is great for our metrics pipeline,” says Maynard. “We can track near-real-time streams that give us graphs of crashes by users and countries.” Using these solutions, CA has gained deeper insights about the player experience so that it can quickly identify and fix bugs in a localized way for minimal impact on players.

AWS for Games Solutions

• Centralized Game Analytics: Game Analytics Pipeline, Serverless Real-Time Analytics for Mobile Gaming

Epic Games

“We decided to go all-in using AWS because they enable us to offer a quality gaming experience to millions of gamers around the world, simultaneously. We are excited to work with AWS to expand our use of analytics, machine learning, and containerized applications using Kubernetes to make our sizable infrastructure even easier to maintain.“ says Chris Dyl Director of Platform, Epic Games To improve business outcomes, Epic’s entire analytics pipeline runs on AWS, delivering insights on service health, massive player tournaments, basic user data, and game design.

79% of developers said finding tools to engage player communities is one of their top concerns in 2023. This response nearly matches a Unity for Games Toxicity in Multiplayer Games Report that found 67% of multiplayer gamers who would likely stop playing a multiplayer game if another player exhibited toxic behavior. AI and ML tools are already helping developers to protect players, improve accessibility, personalize discovery, and predict player purchase or churn behaviors. AI and machine learning for games solutions help with every stage of a developer’s AI and machine learning adoption journey.

AWS for Games Solutions

• Community health: Spectrum Labs Guardian*
• Smart acquisition and retention: Player churn and retention prediction

*New solutions

Guardian, from AWS Partner Spectrum Labs, is a modern content moderation platform, built by a team of data scientists and moderators to support safeguarding player communities.

Angry Birds Dream Blast, developed and published by Rovio Entertainment

With 4 billion analytic events captured per day, Rovio uses machine learning to predict and deliver the perfect level of fun for players. With AWS, Rovio can power its reinforcement learning to predict the difficulty of game levels faster. “This is where AWS really helps us with this particular use case: we bundle the game binary and bot Python source code to a Docker container. We run container per level with AWS Batch, and that takes data collection time down from a year or even five years, down to just two days… we also launched multiple parallel instances of the game and learn from several parallel bots running at the same time, which brings the data collection time down to just four hours.” – says Ignacio Amaya de la Peña, Lead Machine Learning Engineer.

Building for the Future

81% of developers listed creating a vision for their studio as a top priority for 2023. To standout in a hyper-innovative industry, a studio’s vision must include maximizing the talent and creativity of their developers. This requires immense resources that can be deployed on-demand anywhere in the world to provide developers with unlimited flexibility, scale, and performance. AWS for Games brings together unmatched resources across hundreds of AWS partners, dozens of solutions, and a team with 15 years of gaming experience to help developers build, run and grow entirely new experiences for millions of players around the world. Check out the AWS for Games homepage to learn more about the latest news and updates.