Game Production in the Cloud
As game developers face challenges working from home, you need the tools to build games from anywhere in the world.
Create flexible, remote studios
Create virtual workstations that are secure, durable, and, best of all, highly scalable —allowing artists and editors to work on multiple large files.
Reduce the security risk of distributed hardware with a cloud build pipeline that allows you to test new technology, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for iOS and macOS games.
Empower your team to work from anywhere in the world remotely and get them up to speed quickly with the best cloud technology available.
Featured use cases
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Remote graphical workstations
Give designers the flexibility to create anywhere, at any time—offering the flexibility to work some or all workdays from home.
Built on the reliable and secure AWS infrastructure that protects IP, designers can create virtual workstations for artists and editors, build storage workloads comprised of petabytes of data for both hybrid and full cloud pipelines, and reduce overhead and capital expenditure costs over time. AWS provides the infrastructure and integrated partnerships (like Autodesk, Unreal, Unity, Perforce, and more) that enable studios to create the next big hit—no matter the team size or location.
Remote workstations
Virtual workstations on AWS enable studios to take on bigger projects, work from anywhere, and pay only for what they need. Running on Amazon EC2 G4 instances, virtual workstations employ the power of NVIDIA Quadro technology, the visual computing platform trusted by creative and technical professionals.
Graphical instance types
Amazon EC2 G4 instances are the industry’s most cost-effective GPU instances for deploying graphics-intensive applications such as remote graphics workstations, game streaming, and graphics rendering. G4 instances are available with a choice of NVIDIA GPUs (G4dn) or AMD GPUs (G4ad).
G4dn instances feature NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs are ideal for customers who prefer to use NVIDIA software such as RTX Virtual Workstation software and libraries such as CUDA and NVENC. These instances also come with NVIDIA Gaming drivers at no additional cost.
G4ad instances featuring AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs are the lowest cost GPU instance in the AWS Cloud offering up to 25% lower cost than comparable GPU-based instances. These instances provide the best price performance in the cloud for graphics applications including remote workstations, game streaming, and graphics rendering.
Amazon EC2 G5 instances are the latest generation of NVIDIA GPU-based instances featuring NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core CPUS. These instances deliver up to 3x better performance compared to Amazon EC2 G4dn instances for graphics-intensive applications with 24 GB of GPU memory.
Streaming protocols
Sophisticated streaming protocols such as Teradici PCoIP, NICE DCV, and Remote Desktop are a key component in making virtual workstations possible. By streaming pixels and not data, artists are able to work securely and efficiently.
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Development pipeline and build farm
Reduce security risks and protect intellectual property across remote employee environments with a build pipeline in the cloud.
The need for a fast and scalable version control system has always existed. Now, as games grow larger in size and complexity, studios not only need their assets stored in a central location, they need it to be accessible by developers working remotely.
Create cross-platform build pipelines using third parties including Perforce and IncrediBuild. Increase productivity and accelerate time to market by having all of your target builds in one place. Build across console, PC, and mobile in the cloud with Windows and Mac, then easily deploy your games globally at scale.
Learn more about using Perforce on AWS in this blog series »
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Mac OS Development and Testing
Seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments.
Benefit from faster game builds and convenient, distributed testing, without needing to procure, configure, operate, maintain, and upgrade fleets of physical computers. You can also consolidate development of cross-platform iOS, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS. Unlock the ability to move your game development pipelines from on-premises to AWS, enabling you to:
Quickly build, test, and sign
Provision and target macOS environments using Xcode in the cloud, along with popular game engines such as Unity, to build, smoke test, sign, and publish iOS mobile games to the App Store within minutes. Adjust provisioned capacity as needed, while only paying for the systems that are in use.
Create cross-platform build pipelines
Increase productivity and accelerate time to market by having all of your target builds in one place. Build across console, PC, and mobile in the cloud with Windows and Mac, then easily deploy your games globally at scale.
Extend your toolkits
Reduce costs and durable object storage with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), scale block storage with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), enable high storage bandwidth with AWS Nitro System, and monitor your games with Amazon CloudWatch.
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Cloud rendering
Control how quickly you want to complete your project with the flexiblity of rendering on AWS.
Rendering on AWS provides you with the flexibility to control how quickly you want to complete your project. Once your rendering pipeline is integrated with AWS, you can scale rendering workloads to thousands, or even tens of thousands, of cores in minutes. You can also scale down just as quickly as you scale up, providing incredible compute elasticity and cost control. For example, if you have 1,000 frames to render, the cost of rendering on 1 EC2 Spot instance for 1,000 hours or 1,000 Spot Instances for 1 hour is approximately the same.
Not sure where to start?
STEP 1
Introduction to Game Production in the Cloud
Studios are increasing their agility, accelerating production, and improving their team's work/life balance across the globe with game production in the cloud. In this tech talk, learn how to create amazing content from anywhere - all with AWS.
STEP 2
Visual Effects Workstations on AWS
This Quick Start deploys a highly available environment for Microsoft Windows-based, visual effects (VFX) workstations on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.
STEP 3
Building Perforce Helix Core on AWS - Part 1
Part 1 of this blog series explains the benefits of building Perforce servers on AWS and how to build the environment.
STEP 4
Centralize your Game Production Assets on AWS With Perforce Helix Core - Part 2
Part 2 of this blog series details two ways you can get started with Perforce on AWS today.
Featured Customer Story
Quantic Dream expands its talent pool and staff productivity with remote workstations on AWS.
Explore the story »Meet studios that depend on AWS for game production in the cloud
Apocalypse Studio uses AWS to transfer large game assets between colleagues, allowing its team to work effectively from home.
Untold Studios is doing something different. They are the very first creative studio completely born in the cloud.
Sony Interactive Entertainment is modernizing its existing infrastructure to remotely render visual images and effects using AWS.
Partner Solutions
See more solutions in the AWS Partner Network or the AWS Marketplace >
Industry leading desktop streaming solution that supports existing deployments and can also build new environments.
Allows teams to run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines and connect easily to them.
Industry leading version control solution that can take full advantage of AWS infrastructure.
Distributed processing technology that lets studios reduce compiling time by expanding compute power to AWS.
Amazon EC2 instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs deliver the scalable performance needed for fast ML training, cost-effective ML inference, flexible remote virtual workstations, and powerful HPC computations.
Through our partnership with AMD, AWS offers additional EC2 instances that add to the broadest and deepest portfolio of instances and enables you to optimize both cost and performance for your workload needs.
Related Content
See related technical guides, webinars, white papers and much more.
Learn about the different compute solutions AWS Game Tech offers on an infrastructure that provides the most scalable network for games.
Using AWS and Unreal Engine 4’s Pixel Streaming solution, developers can create content with Unreal Engine and deploy on AWS so users can engage with the content from any modern Web browser.
Amazon EC2 Mac instances help developers create entire cross-platform game development build farms in the cloud that previously were a mix of on-premises and the cloud.
New to AWS Game Tech?
Choose from a range of game developer courses, explore our ramp-up guide, or build your skills with a hands-on lab.
Ready to start building your game in the cloud?
Whether you’re a team of one or one thousand, we’d love to learn more about your game development needs.