In this AWS re:Invent 2023 keynote video, Brent Rich, head of global infrastructure and operations at Riot Games, shares how it transformed from a single-game company depending on local data centers to support hundreds of millions of players to a cloud-first gaming company with several major titles.
Riot Games is the development company behind League of Legends, VALORANT, and other popular online multiplayer games. Rich explains how the company took full advantage of the global cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), using AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Outposts to achieve design goals for VALORANT while ensuring a low latency and highly competitive experience for players.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Riot Games used AWS to reinvent Esports broadcasts to deliver a remote solution in just days, using Amazon Workspaces and then evolved to build remote broadcast centers in Dublin, Ireland and Seattle, Washington using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Elemental MediaLive, and other services to remove the need for onsite production teams. Riot Games also worked with the AWS team to migrate and moderinize its original title, League of Legends, from data centers to a modernized, unified cloud architecture using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), reducing downtime from hours to just hiccups.
AWS was and is the premier player in the cloud space, and having worked with them at that point for several years, we had experienced their customer obsession first-hand… With AWS, we were able to supercharge our business and make it better to be a player.”
Brent Rich
Head of Global Infrastructure and Operations, Riot Games
About Riot Games
Based in Los Angeles, California, Riot Games is a video game developer and publisher, renowned for creating one of the world’s most-played PC games: League of Legends. To provide players with global availability and secure, low-latency access, Riot Games migrated hundreds of millions of player accounts into a consolidated, globally-replicated composite database cluster on AWS. In 2020, Riot Games launched its latest title, Valorant, using AWS Outposts to develop new co-locations quickly and enable rapid deployment of game servers, standardized on a single build, test, and production pipeline. It also reduced latency by 10-20 ms, minimizing “peeker’s advantage” and creating a level playing field for all players. On AWS, Riot Games’ teams are continuing to reinvent how to design and deploy its games to provide players with the best possible game experience.
Learn more about how Riot Games is teaming up with AWS to reimagine eSports.
Customer Speaker: Brent Rich
Brent Rich is the Head of Global Infrastructure & Operations at Riot Games, the developer and publisher behind genre-defining games including League of Legends and VALORANT. Reporting to Riot’s CTO, Brent is accountable for cloud, data centers, connectivity, and technology governance, in addition to overseeing the 24/7 live operations for technology services. Since 2018, Brent has co-led Riot’s “all-in-on-cloud” strategy including the modernization and migration of League of Legends to the cloud. In addition to League, his organization provides the critical infrastructure and operations used to launch and operate Teamfight Tactics (TFT), Legends of Runeterra, Wild Rift, and VALORANT.
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