FromSoftware produces popular action game series such as ARMORED CORE and DARK SOULS. In addition to games for home video game consoles, it has been working on an increasing number of Windows PC game titles in recent years.

The company has been offering online services, in which a player can enjoy playing against other players, starting from the game title it released in 2006. At that time, since the service was operated in an on-premise environment, building and running servers proved onerous. With physical game titles, sales tend to spike immediately following a launch with a rise in the number of concurrent connections, after which the number of users gradually decline. For this reason, although the server environment needs to be made ready with enough spare capacity, it is difficult to predict how many copies a game will sell, and if sales exceed expectations, the servers must be scaled in a hurry. Therefore, the company adopted AWS starting from the online service for ARMORED CORE V, released in 2012.
“Online services for games incur high server costs. It is also difficult to continue to maintain them with a small operations team. Therefore, we decided to adopt AWS, which allows us to scale up/scale out and scale in/scale down servers depending on demand. The deciding factor was that, with AWS, there was a wealth of publicly available technical information, making it easy for us to gain expertise in-house,” says Design Section Leader Shinichiro Nishida.

Since then, the company, which had been running online services for its game titles on Amazon EC2, decided to modernize its architecture from around 2016, and began developing a new action RPG title, ELDEN RING. The ELDEN RING online service used Amazon EKS, which is a service that migrates the environment in which applications are run to containers and uses Kubernetes as the tool to deploy and manage containers on AWS. Nobuyuki Okamura, the Design Section Sub-Leader, says,
“The reason we migrated to containers was to resolve deployment-related environmental differences in middleware and library installation that had occurred in our previous environment. Since the cost of maintaining deployment tools and the number of proprietary management tools relating to containers had risen after migrating to containers, we used Kubernetes, the default tool, to centralize. At the same time, to reduce the operational load on Kubernetes, we adopted the managed service of Amazon EKS.”

To collect server logs, the company adopted Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which collects streaming data in real time. The log output destination is set to Amazon OpenSearch Service, and a range of metrics such as standard output logs, various server logs, number of connections, and number of requests are presented in visual form. Hiroyuki Fujii, Chief of the Design Section, remarks,
“When load testing is performed during development, a large number of logs are generated. With the open source data collection tool (fluentd), the aggregation server did not scale, often resulting in high load and log drops. So we adopted Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose as a solution to prevent log drops. The Amazon OpenSearch Service, the visualization tool, has also become indispensable because of how easy it is to change instance sizes, which is one of the strengths of a managed service.

Development of ELDEN RING began in earnest in 2018, and the game was released worldwide in February 2022. ELDEN RING is an action RPG in which players roam freely on an adventure inside a vast fantasy world, using swords and magic. The platforms supported are PlayStation® 5, PlayStation® 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Steam. ELDEN RING recorded 1 million concurrent connections from all over the world immediately following its launch, and hit more than 1.5 million concurrent connections two weeks later.
“We initially expected 200,000 concurrent connections immediately after release, but at the point when we were taking pre-orders 2 months prior to release, we were able to predict 400,000, which was revised to 1 million one month prior to release. Although we felt a sense of urgency at the unexpected numbers, we were able to respond by increasing our server resources thanks to AWS. The people in charge at AWS helped us out with their quick support, such as by speedily accommodating our last-minute requests just before the launch,” says Okamura.

Currently, the server team for ELDEN RING consists of around four people. Engineers oversee operations for multiple game titles, and therefore it is not possible to devote a significant amount of resources to a single game. Therefore, the benefits gained from managed services are considerable, and this has enabled speedy development and stable operations.
“One of the biggest benefits concerns the management of logs. In the past, log-related failures occurred two to three times a month, but with the adoption of Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, log-related failures have fallen to zero, allowing us to concentrate on game development work,” says Okamura.

Modernization of the architecture of online services, which was kick-started with the development of ELDEN RING, is set to continue in the future with re-evaluations of the architecture.
“For databases, we would like to consider Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora in order to boost scalability. In the area of static content, we will consider making various improvements, such as content distribution using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3, and regarding deployment to Amazon EKS, moving from the existing open source environment to CI/CD using AWS CloudFormation,” says Okamura.

The company plans to actively utilize AWS Managed Services for future titles as well, and will continue to release appealing game titles while reducing the operational load.
“The reason we have been able to operate online services for the game, which has been played by a multitude of users around the world and has shipped more than 13.4 million units worldwide, without any disruptions with a small but highly skilled team in place, is thanks to AWS, and the efforts by members of our development team to modernize the architecture with operational efficiency in mind. In the future, we will consider moving our game development environment to the cloud as we build up our development team, and we will continue to look for ways to optimize the use of AWS from the perspectives of both service and development. We look forward to continued consultations with AWS, as well as to the useful managed services it will offer," says Nishida.