AWS for Games Blog

Jackbox Games unlocks new opportunities with Amazon GameLift Streams

Jackbox Games is a Chicago-based game studio best known for its lineup of popular party-game hits such as Quiplash, Fibbage, Drawful, Trivia Murder Party, and more. With 50 games and counting in its catalog, Jackbox Games offers something for everyone—whether it’s a drawing game, a trivia game, a hidden identity game, or beyond. Jackbox Games’ north star is accessible gaming, which means meeting customers where they are. About a year and a half ago, the Jackbox Games team began exploring alternative ways to reach more players and streamline both player accessibility and internal development.

Jackbox Games has earned legions of fans and brought groups of friends together through its simple set up—the game on your TV and players using their phones as controllers. Having built its entire server infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jackbox Games ultimately connected with the Amazon GameLift team in an effort to make its games available through streaming. They were seeking a direct-to-player relationship in everything including publishing, user experience, and monetization. Enter a new capability under the Amazon GameLift managed service, Amazon GameLift Streams. It empowers developers to deliver high frame rate, low-latency game streaming to more devices at a global scale.

“When we first started out with Amazon GameLift Streams, it just worked—we were shocked at how easy it was to get our game uploaded and live,” shared Evan Jacover, CTO of Jackbox Games. “Based on our experiences talking with other streaming platforms, we were anticipating having to do a custom build, but we didn’t need to. We just took our Windows build, uploaded it to Amazon GameLift Streams, and it ran. The whole process was efficient, and the game looked and sounded great.”

Controlling costs at scale

Bringing any one game to a streaming platform for the first time can be a major undertaking and Jackbox Games has a sizable game library. Scalability, compatibility, cost efficiency, and monetization all factored into the company’s decision to build its new streaming service with Amazon GameLift Streams.

“We have a large catalog and we eventually want people to be able to access all of our games,” explained Jacover. “It would require a lot of overhead to achieve scale capacity for each game individually. AWS worked with us to add all 50 games in our catalog to a single Stream Group in Amazon GameLift Streams. Now we can scale capacity for our whole catalog, which makes everything much more efficient. Keeping costs down is the key to making streaming work from a business standpoint, so these efficiencies really add up.”

AWS also worked closely with Jackbox Games to increase multi-tenancy and further reduce costs. As these games aren’t graphics-intensive, demanding lot of GPU power, a single instance can run multiple games.

“We want to encourage players to play as much as they want without worrying about server costs. Ads allow us to do that. Amazon GameLift Streams has a critical feature called Data Channel that helps us easily implement ads at natural breaks in the gameplay, such as between rounds,” added Jacover.

Streamlining updates and future releases

Jackbox Games traditionally releases its games through Party Packs: collections of five original games each; to date, they have released ten distinct party packs. If the company makes an update to any individual game, they have to update the whole pack of five games across all first-party platforms. Updating games has historically been a complicated process for the team—until now.

“We see Amazon GameLift Streams as a really exciting capability that gives us more control over our games than we’ve ever had before,” said Jacover. “Streaming allows us to update one game, in one place—we don’t have to worry about all the different platforms or the Party Packs. We’re excited about breaking the games out of the Party Packs and letting players jump from any game to any other, making the flow much more elegant. This could ultimately be the ideal way to experience our games.”

Offering access to the entire, growing game library through its own streaming service will also improve discoverability, even for seasoned Jackbox Games players.

“If you already own one or two Party Packs, you might just stick with those. However, if you have a Jackbox Games streaming service that offers you access to all the games, you might explore more of them,” explained Jacover.

Quick and integrated support

As Jackbox Games was ramping up with Amazon GameLift Streams, it was a huge benefit to have AWS support integrated directly into the Jackbox Games company Slack channel.

“AWS support has really been a highlight for us,” expressed Jacover. “With AWS directly in our company Slack, it was so easy for us to just pop in and ask a question. Everyone was so responsive to everything. It was a great way to really feel like AWS is part of our team, because they’re right there, where our team is communicating with each other.”

As a dedicated AWS customer, Jackbox Games sees these benefits far beyond Amazon GameLlift Streams. The company’s server infrastructure is entirely on AWS, and the many AWS services it uses include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront content delivery network, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and more.

Looking ahead

The team at Jackbox Games is thrilled to be bringing its party games to players in an entirely new way through streaming, and to reach new players along the way. With Amazon GameLift Streams, Jackbox Games will enable anyone with a smart TV to get up and running immediately with a dedicated Jackbox Games streaming app and a TV remote. Existing players can find a more elegant and streamlined way to play Jackbox Games many titles, without struggling to screen share and sync the audio for everyone tuned in to play. New players, who do not own a gaming console, can explore Jackbox Games’ offerings more easily than ever before.

“I see my parents as a perfect example of the new players we can reach through streaming,” shared Jacover. “A lot of our family gatherings take place at their house, and they’ll never have a game console, but they do have a smart TV. Now, navigating Jackbox Games for them can be just like navigating Netflix. It’s easy and familiar, and there’s no separate device required to make it work. That’s our goal—to make playing our games as easy as pulling out a board game.”

Another benefit of using streaming technology is that Jackbox Games can now support all types of games, even if they are built in a different engine than their existing games. This means that the studio can look into licensing games from other developers in the future, if they choose to do so.

Jacover concluded, “Having a streaming service opens up new business models that we couldn’t do with our existing Party Pack structure. Amazon GameLift Streams just gives us so much flexibility to do things differently and to keep evolving.”

Learn more about Amazon GameLift Streams or get in touch with an AWS for Games representative.

Further reading

David Holladay

David Holladay

David Holladay is the head of AWS for Games Product Marketing.