AWS for Games Blog

The most difficult engineering problem when employing AI for gaming isn’t selecting the correct model—it’s selecting the infrastructure that supports the functionality needed to create compelling user experiences. A generative non-player character (NPC) that forgets every conversation, an AI dungeon master that loses narrative context mid-quest, or an agentic loop that drops state across an AWS Lambda cold start all produce sub-par experiences for the same reason: no durable, globally consistent state storage layer.

In this post, we compare four AWS storage options for P4 depot volumes: Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) archive depots. We evaluate each against real-world game development workloads and provide a decision framework to help you choose.

Over 230 million Americans identify as gamers. Yet most will never buy a $500 console or a $1,500 PC, not because they don’t want to play, but because the cost of entry keeps climbing: hundreds (sometimes thousands) in hardware, hundreds of gigabytes in downloads, and frustrating maintenance just to keep things running.

For developers and publishers, the gap is even wider. Building a great game is only half the battle; without a way for players to experience it firsthand, building a player base relies on secondhand impressions. While trailers generate hype and reviews build credibility, neither can replicate the engagement of letting players experience the game for themselves.

Learn how Instant Play Demos powered by Amazon GameLift Streams are a unique approach to marketing video games. Studios can use them to present a time-bound slice of gameplay to potential players without requiring downloads or installs by using cloud game streaming.

In this post, I walk you through the two DDoS Protection options provided with Amazon GameLift Servers: Enhanced DDoS Protection and Player Gateway. You will learn how each option works, the tradeoffs between them, and how to adopt them for your game.

In this post, we discuss some of the differences between the two hosting options and cover how to migrate from an Agones-based implementation to Amazon GameLift Servers.

Amazon GameLift Streams now supports using a dedicated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that can grant your streaming game sessions access to AWS resources in your account. In this blog post, we show you how to use that role with a lightweight launcher script to persist game saves from your player’s streaming sessions to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) without needing to make any changes to your game code.

In this post, we show you the key considerations for building a dedicated mobile frontend that solves these challenges while reusing the existing backend infrastructure and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) deployment pattern of Part 1.

Learn how for one games studio, their operations team spend 60% of their time context-switching between AWS Console interfaces and troubleshooting capacity issues during launch events. During one major content release, manual scaling decisions led to a 2-hour queue time spike that resulted in 12% player churn.