Amazon GameLift Features

Deploy your game servers in 24 AWS Regions across 5 continents to reach your players with low-latency connections. Whether your game is a first person shooter, a MOBA, or other multiplayer game genre, your players worldwide can enjoy the fast-paced gameplay you have designed. GameLift continually scans for available game servers around the world. If low-latency game servers are not available, you can configure the service to automatically add more capacity nearby your players. GameLift maintains a queue of waiting players until new games start or new instances launch, then places those players into the lowest latency game.

GameLift runs on the AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure, which is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services, including GameLift, from data centers globally. AWS provides you the cloud infrastructure where and when you need it to deploy game servers closer to your players with low latency.

GameLift’s autoscaling feature can start one, hundreds, or even thousands of instances simultaneously and stop unused instances in just minutes. You configure the service to automatically scale capacity based on a steady-state percentage target. GameLift will automatically add or remove capacity as needed, adjusting to fluctuating load patterns to minimizing rapid fluctuations in capacity.

GameLift is designed to safeguard your game servers from frequently occurring network and transport layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. You can also configure the service to autoscale server capacity to absorb DDoS attacks without taking your players offline. Learn more about protecting game servers from DDoS attacks.

GameLift offers both on-demand and Spot instance types. With Spot instances you get the same high-performance hardware as on-demand instances at savings up to 70%. With all GameLift instances you have the flexibility to select a configuration of CPU, memory, and networking capacity that is optimal for your game. And all GameLift instances come with Enhanced Networking, which provides significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower latencies.

The GameLift management console includes dashboards for monitoring the performance of your game. You can see real-time data on player demand, server capacity and health, CPU and memory utilization, and create operational alarms using Amazon CloudWatch. GameLift also lets you automatically collect and store game server logs for retrieval and inspection.

GameLift supports all major game engines, including Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, and custom C# and C++ game engines. With GameLift you can also connect your community across devices and broaden your pool of players for potential matches.

GameLift includes everything you need to run your dedicated game servers in the cloud – a high-performance virtual machine, SSD-based storage, fast data transfer to the Internet – on demand without monthly commitments. You only pay for the resources you actually use.

Use your existing tools and software without GameLift’s game server management layer to gradually move live games or launch new games to the cloud with the cost savings of EC2 Spot instances made possible only with GameLift FleetIQ. Since instances run in your account, you also have the flexibility to use containers or integrate instances with other AWS services such as AWS Shield and Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Save up to 70% compared to existing on-premises deployments by using FleetIQ's algorithm that puts low-cost Spot instances into your own AWS account. FleetIQ monitors in real-time and predicts which Spot instances are best suited to host new sessions, so you get the cost-savings of Spot while directing players onto instances with lower probability to have game session interruptions.

GameLift is available in 60 instance types and 22 regions so that you can pick the instance type and geography that is best for your game. Check out all the regions where GameLift is available. Check out all the regions where GameLift is available in our FAQ.

With general availability for the GameLift FleetIQ update, only pay for what you use. GameLift FleetIQ charges a fee proportional to the EC2 instance charges under GameLift FleetIQ management. For full details, learn more on the pricing table. 

Opt out of using Spot Instances. This is useful for short periods of time with new game and content launches. We still recommend switching back to Spot-Preferred or Spot-Only modes to save on game server costs.

Describe the status of instances managed under GameLift FleetIQ using the new DescribeGameServerInstances API, whether it’s active, draining, or terminating. This allows you to implement a status-based checkpoint mechanism before you place a game session on an instance. It also allows you to drain your other resources if they’re tied to the instances.

GameLift’s FlexMatch capabilities let you match players together based on rules you define. Whether you choose to build your matchmaking based on player skill, latency, or custom criteria, FlexMatch’s simple but powerful rules language makes it easy for anyone to quickly create robust player matchmaking. GameLift can automatically place the formed matches onto GameLift servers in the AWS region that best balances player latency and server cost. Or you can use FlexMatch in standalone mode and place the formed matches onto your own servers. Learn more about FlexMatch in our developer guide.

If you’re looking to create a player-intensive, “Battle Royale” style game, FlexMatch now enables you to match and connect up to 200 players to a single game session on the lowest latency server instance available—all based upon a custom rule you define. Large Match Support also includes the ability to create multiple teams from one definition and automated backfilling. Learn more in the FlexMatch developer guide. 

Register your computer as hardware with Amazon GameLift to send game sessions to that machine. The local hardware will work exactly the same as an Amazon EC2 fully managed server would. Once the local hardware is registered, you can compile, deploy, and test your game session directly on your computer.

Register any compute with Amazon GameLift to create what’s known as an Anywhere Fleet. Hardware managed on-premises can be mixed-and-matched with Amazon EC2 fully managed hardware. With GameLift Anywhere, you don't need to run and operate separate game server management software for your cloud and on-premises workloads.

Game developers value flexibility in their matchmaker to iterate quickly and identify the right set of matchmaking rules that make their games fun. But a matchmaker with that flexibility is difficult to build in-house and at scale because doing so requires expertise in distributed compute. FlexMatch lets developers skip that lengthy upfront development effort and dive right into optimizing their rulesets. Now, FlexMatch is also accessible in standalone mode so developers can place formed matches on any game server solution.

GameLift Realtime Servers include a network stack, with TCP and UDP networking provided out of the box.

Update server logic in real time by quickly customizing scripts. Add state and choose to execute server logic at regular intervals.

Once you’ve created your game server, scale to millions with Amazon GameLift and realize the benefits of running dedicated servers like minimized lag, reduced cheating, and improved stability.

Designed with a small footprint, you’ll reduce costs by running more games on a single server instance.

Use GameLift Realtime Servers at no additional cost outside of GameLift’s current prices.