AWS for Games Blog
Amazon GameLift is now easier to manage fleets across regions
Today, we’re excited to release an update to Amazon GameLift that enables you as a game developer to speed up your time to market using simpler fleet management. GameLift, an AWS managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated servers for multiplayer games, enables you as a developer to create a 200+ player battle royale game with Large Match Support or automatically adapt server capacity with player traffic using Autoscaling. With this update, you can get up and running faster by creating and uploading builds once, replicate, and deploy in multiple regions. Let’s dig in.
Launch dedicated, low-cost game servers, faster
At the start of 2021, we continued gathering customer feedback to identify the most requested feature updates. Towards the top of the list was the ability to more easily flip the switches to deploy regions, so you can tap into regions where players are located, faster. With simplified fleet management tools, we have reduced the complexity of creating and managing separate fleets, so you only have to create and upload a build once, replicate, and then deploy across multiple regions. That way, you are not spending time, money, and effort spinning your wheels creating one fleet for each region. Instead, you now spend less time managing fleets and can dedicate more time doing what you love most, building fun games. Specifically:
- Build once, deploy anywhere. Simplify fleet management by creating and uploading builds once, replicate, and deploy in multiple regions. Key regions that support this simplified fleet management include: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland), Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney, and Tokyo).
- Access an easier to use console. It’s now easier to dive into the metrics. Previously, you had to aggregate multiple fleet metrics across all regions. Now, with a location dimension, all metrics are aggregated so you can grab and view metrics for all locations from the fleet’s region.
Along with simplifying these tools, we have also added an additional six new regions (from 15 to 21) places players closest to where they are playing to ensure a smooth experience. To learn more about the new regions, check out this blog post.
“Customers continue to tell us that speed to market is critical for success,” said Vatsal Bhardwaj, General Manager of AWS Game Tech services. “GameLift is already loved by customers for delivering a low cost, reliable player experience. With this update, we’re excited to enable them to deploy even faster with easier to use fleet management, all on the global scale of an AWS service.”
For a complete list, GameLift supports 40 instance types and 21 regions including: US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, and Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (São Paulo), and China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet.
How Wargaming, GungHo, and others leverage GameLift
Some of the world’s most successful game companies already trust GameLift for their games, including Wargaming, GungHo (Ninjala), and Ubisoft (For Honor). These are just a few GameLift FleetIQ customer stories today, and we’re excited to share more customer stories throughout the year.
“As part of our partnership with Wargaming to deliver a AAA multiplatform, free-to-play shooter, we want to unify players from all over the world, so providing global availability is in our DNA and is one of our top priorities,” said Sergii Rustamov, Technical Director at FragLab. “That is why Amazon GameLift is one of the top choices for backend servers. GameLift helps us to design our server management solution to work with different technologies and tools, and its architecture makes possible to easily choose servers that are geographically closer to players. Since GameLift is deeply integrated with Amazon’s AAA engine, Lumberyard, setup was even easier and works right out of the box, speeding up our development and time to market. Using GameLift, we were able to build our game on stable, scalable, and readily available servers from all over the world, while keeping costs low and ensuring fun, smooth gameplay experiences that keeps players coming back for more.”
Similarly, Takanori Kikuchi, CTO at GungHo Online Entertainment stated, “At GungHo, our mission is to create the most exciting games on a global scale.” Takanori continued, “We constantly evolve our development capabilities and operations to deliver joy and wonder to players without being reliant on hardware or location. In our latest game Ninjala, Amazon GameLift provides smooth gameplay experiences with dedicated game server hosting, handles all of the management to easily deploy and manage game servers at low cost, and automatically matches players for optimum latency during peak times.”
Getting started with GameLift
As a reminder, in 2020, customers wanted an option to use their existing tools without GameLift’s game server management layer. So, we enabled GameLift FleetIQ and GameLift FlexMatch to do just that, while still experiencing up to 70% cost-savings compared to existing on-premises deployments. Now that 2021 is in full swing, this is just one of our first new releases, so stay tuned for more updates coming throughout the year. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this update and what features you would like to see in the future. Connect with the GameLift team on the forums or through the AWS Game Tech social media channels.