Make the most of re:Invent 2021 with the Game Tech industry guide

The entire AWS Game Tech team welcomes you to celebrate 10 years of AWS re:Invent this year. We’re back in Las Vegas (and virtually) with an exciting program planned with five keynotes, more than 20 leadership sessions, and over 1,200 breakout and interactive sessions from November 29 through December 3, 2021. Plus, stop by the AWS for Media & Entertainment and Games Lounge at the Venetian to network and learn from AWS experts and your peers.

To get the most out of your re:Invent 2021 experience, follow these steps:

• Register for re:Invent 2021 to attend in-person or virtually.
• Find all the Games sessions available, plus other information and activities, in the curated Games Attendee Guide.
• Once registered, review the catalog to “favorite” sessions you are interested in.
• Bookmark this post and check back regularly for the latest updates and information.

Can’t join us in Las Vegas? Registering virtually grants free access to live keynotes and leadership sessions, plus access to on-demand breakout sessions. Every in-person registration comes with free virtual access. Learn more about COVID-19 health measures at re:Invent.

Game Tech at re:Invent 2021

Behind great games, developers of all sizes are using AWS Game Tech to build faster, operate smarter, and create immersive experiences for players. At AWS re:Invent, hear from industry leading engineers, developers, and decision makers who are utilizing cloud technology to reinvent and how the next generation of games are made and played, including Epic Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), and Riot Games. Learn first-hand how they are breaking free from traditional on-premises solutions, moving game production processes to the cloud, and are building connected worlds that scale to millions of players at launch and support milli-second low latency multiplayer sessions, wherever and however they play.

Download the full Games Attendee Guide to get further information on all games industry related sessions, activities, and ‘how to re:Invent’. Here’s some session highlights below:

GAM203: How Epic Games develops Fortnite faster with a build farm on AWS

Epic Games is a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of real-time 3D creation technology. Epic is also the creator of Fortnite – one of the world’s most popular games, with over 350 million accounts. In this session, learn how with the help of AWS, Fortnite entertains players around the world years after its initial release in 2017. By migrating its internal build farm from on-premises to AWS services, including Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, Epic drastically improved development iteration times and its rapid release cycle to continually deliver fresh content to players.

Speakers: Alex Carberry, Infrastructure Architect at Epic Games and Greg Troyan, Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS Game Tech

GAM201: How Sony Interactive Entertainment launched PlayStation 5

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is a global leader in interactive and digital entertainment responsible for creating the world-renowned PlayStation brand and family of products. In this session, see how SIE prepared for the launch of PlayStation 5 against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Learn how SIE delivered PS5 without downtime to millions of players around the world using a Coordinated Operations Planned Response program and a robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure using AWS services including Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon CloudWatch.

Speakers: Jess Loeb and Nathan Northcutt, Principle Software Engineers at Sony PlayStation, and Alex Jestin Taylor, Solution Architect at AWS Game Tech

GAM302: Riot Games at the edge: Launching VALORANT with AWS Outposts

Riot Games develops, publishes, and supports some of the most player-focused games in the world, including League of Legends, one of the world’s most played PC games and a key driver for the explosive growth of eSports. In this session, watch how Riot Games orchestrated the successful global deployment of its latest 5v5 character-based tactical shooter, Valorant. Using AWS services including AWS Outposts and AWS Global Accelerator, Riot rapidly deployed and scaled game servers to millions of players around the world and reduced latency by up to 20 milliseconds, providing players with a seamless real-time gaming experience.

Speakers: David Press, Senior Principle Software Engineer at Riot Games, and Ashwin Raghuraman, Solution Architect at AWS Game Tech

The following sessions are in-person only events and not available on-demand.

GAM301: Simulate a multiplayer game launch powered by AWS [In-person only]

3D creation tools are well known for creating immersive game worlds that transport players into other dimensions. In this session, explore how developers are using this same technology to simulate virtual environments and study outcomes that would be too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to evaluate in the real world. Learn how Lockheed Martin and CAE used AWS, Unity, and Unreal to create massive-scale simulations of real-world environments with millions of dynamic objects to increase situational readiness for scenarios ranging from natural disasters to cyber threats.

Speakers: Eric Kim and Sam Biggins, Solution Architects at AWS Game Tech

GAM305: Develop, build, and test iOS games on EC2 Mac instances [In-person only]

Break free from the restrictions of on-premises hardware and extend the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to iOS game development. In this workshop, walk through the steps to run your build pipeline in the cloud using Amazon EC2 Mac instances and EC2 Linux Spot Instances. Learn how to reduce the time and resources previously spent building and maintaining on-premises macOS environments. Focus entirely on the fun stuff by using AWS to provision and access macOS environments within minutes, reduce costs, and improve scalability and performance to develop, build, test, analyze, and improve iOS games.

Speakers: Molly Sheets, Eugene Krasikov, and Sergey Viktorovich Kurson, Solution Architects at AWS Game Tech

GAM303: Extend your global game architecture to the edge with AWS [In-person only]

Players expect globally available, low-latency, lightning-fast gameplay as standard. But your global game server strategy shouldn’t come at a cost. In this chalk talk, discover how to deliver a faster, high-performance networking and game server strategy for your games, regardless of device or genre, using AWS edge computing. Learn how to ensure a global presence by moving infrastructure closer to your players and providing a seamless experience without compromising cost or operational overhead. Accelerate content delivery with Amazon CloudFront, extend your architecture to the edge with AWS Outposts, and optimize user traffic to reduce packet loss and deliver low-latency experiences with AWS Global Accelerator.

Speakers: Natasha Rooney and David Heidt, Solution Architects at AWS Game Tech

GAM304: Global game servers with compute, containers, and Amazon GameLift [In-person only]

Long player wait times and unstable game sessions can make even the most entertaining games unplayable. In this chalk talk, learn how to route players into game sessions faster and more efficiently and deliver seamless, low-latency experiences to gamers, wherever and however they choose to play. Explore different architectures to help you find the perfect networking and game server solution—whether you choose to gain granular control over processors, storage, and networking with Amazon EC2, run containerized microservices with Amazon ECS, or let Amazon GameLift handle the heavy lifting of deploying and managing dedicated game servers.

Speakers: Liga Viskinte, Technical Account Manager and Toni Syvanen, Solution Architect at AWS Game Tech