Launching a multiplayer game at scale using AWS with People Can Fly

Founded in 2002, People Can Fly returned to independence in 2015 after operating as Epic Games Poland. Lost Rift marks the studio’s first self-published online multiplayer game, increasing the importance of backend reliability.

During initial testing, the game faced service outages and scaling issues. With only a few months before public playtests for Lost Rift, People Can Fly began evaluating providers that could deliver predictable scalability and greater control over the infrastructure.

People Can Fly chose to implement Amazon GameLift Servers, game servers that are toughened to handle multiplayer games at massive scale. The studio worked alongside AWS and Pragma to develop a custom integration between Pragma—a managed backend platform for multiplayer games—and Amazon GameLift, with People Can Fly providing the first production test case. “We were able to get things up and running securely and launch our public play test in a short time frame,” says Clifford Roche, project technical lead for Lost Rift at People Can Fly. “Once we connected to Amazon GameLift, things just worked.”

Together, People Can Fly, Pragma, and AWS worked quickly to develop a custom plugin connecting Pragma’s backend services and Amazon GameLift Servers container fleets. Within 2 weeks, the team completed an internal play test with 200 participants to validate the deployment pipeline. The full migration to Amazon GameLift was completed in 2–3 months.

Lost Rift uses Pragma’s managed backend service as the entry point for player connections. Pragma’s solution runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload—within Pragma’s AWS environment. When players join a game, Pragma sends a request to People Can Fly’s Amazon GameLift fleets. The stack builds and deploys container images tagged with version identifiers for tracking. Updates can be deployed in the background while the game is live, and when the client updates, players are automatically switched over to the new fleet. In this way, People Can Fly can deploy updates without downtime. The setup also simplifies testing. “We can very easily scale out and set up specialized builds for testing the full flow internally,” says Roche.

People Can Fly deploys its Amazon GameLift containers using AWS Graviton–based container fleets, which are powered by AWS Graviton server processors. They use the Arm instruction set. “The ability to launch on Graviton-based container fleets provided a substantial cost savings compared to the non-Arm-based instances that we would have been restricted to with other providers,” says Roche.

Throughout the process, People Can Fly had direct points of contact with technical teams at AWS and Pragma, and when Lost Rift became available through Early Access on Steam, it had a dedicated communications channel for all three teams to support the launch. With the launch of Lost Rift, People Can Fly became one of the first to adopt Amazon GameLift container fleets in production, and the studio provided critical feedback to AWS product teams to shape service improvements. “The general level of support has been excellent, and the collaboration leading up to and through the launch was wonderful,” says Roche. “We’ve been able to talk directly to the solution developers, and our questions and needs have been well understood.”

Lost Rift launched through Early Access on Steam in September 2025 with 1,500 concurrent sessions across 5 global regions and no downtime.

By using Amazon GameLift container fleets, People Can Fly reduced iteration and testing time for new features from more than 2 hours to 5 minutes. To optimize performance, the studio can adjust instance types, hardware, and regional allocations as demand shifts. “We weren’t sure what the user counts were going to be for Lost Rift,” says Roche. “On Amazon GameLift, we can pivot very quickly if volumes change.”

People Can Fly plans to continue improving the game by integrating Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)—a fully managed message queuing service—to improve telemetry and player feedback during matchmaking. The studio will also implement automatic scaling to wind down regions that are not in use, which People Can Fly expects will further reduce development costs. “I have confidence in the skill and professionalism of the Amazon GameLift team to deliver a service that we can rely on,” says Roche.