Instead of using the traditional approach of buying a fixed amount of servers that run continuously all month, with Amazon GameLift you only pay for the capacity you use. Amazon GameLift charges for instances by duration of use and bandwidth by quantity of data transferred. See a pricing example.
Typical multiplayer games use 50% of their peak server capacity on average. This means that half of the time their game servers have no active players. Amazon GameLift’s autoscaling feature can automatically turns off game servers when they are not needed and adds new game servers when more players arrive.
Amazon GameLift offers both On-Demand and Spot instances. With Spot instances you get the same high-performance hardware as On-Demand instances at savings up to 90%. You can achieve these savings while maintaining high game server availability with the use of FleetIQ, a feature that places new game sessions on game servers based on player latencies, instance prices, and Spot interruption rates. Learn more about using FleetIQ and Spot instances.
The following tables display the hourly Spot and On-Demand prices for each region and instance type (updated every 5 minutes).
With Amazon GameLift Spot instance types you pay the Spot price that’s in effect at the beginning of each instance-hour for your running instance. If Spot price changes after you launch the instance, the new price is charged against the instance usage for the subsequent hour. Spot instance prices are set by Amazon Web Services and adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply and demand for Spot instance capacity, but never exceed On-Demand prices. In the Amazon GameLift console, you can view three months of historical pricing and savings data for every instance type and region.
Looking for Windows Pricing?
Linux pricing is per instance-second consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. While prices for Linux are listed on a per-hour basis, bills are calculated down to the second. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per instance.
*“Monthly w/ Autoscaling” is calculated using an average monthly usage of 365 hours per instance, which is based upon a typical player demand pattern for multiplayer games.
Except as otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. Learn more.
Looking for Linux Pricing?
Windows pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed is billed as a full hour.
*“Monthly w/ Autoscaling” is calculated using an average monthly usage of 365 hours per instance, which is based upon a typical player demand pattern for multiplayer games.
Except as otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. Learn more.
Looking for T2, M3, C3, or R3 instances? See the Previous Generation Instances page.
You are charged data transfer fees for traffic between your game servers and your game clients. Inbound data transfer is free. For outbound data transfer rates to other AWS services and regions, visit the Data Transfer Rates.
Except as otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. Learn more.
Contact us for pricing for data transfer greater than 500 TB / month.
This example uses a typical hourly player demand pattern for multiplayer games to illustrate Amazon GameLift pricing. In this example, we’ll assume that your game launches in Japan and attracts 10,000 players. As shown below, the number of concurrent players follows a typical usage pattern.
In this example, your game has the fewest number of players in the morning (800 players at 7:00 am), a spike at lunch (4,350 players at 1:00 pm), and a daily peak in the evening (6,480 players at 10:00 pm).
Amazon GameLift offers instance types with different compute, memory, and networking capabilities. We’ll assume that you decide to host your game server using c4.xlarge instances running Linux. You've profiled your game server performance and found that each c4.xlarge instance can run 4 games with up to 10 players simultaneously.
Throughout the day, as your player demand shifts, you will need more or less capacity. For example, from 7:00 am to 8:00 am you will need 20 instances to meet player demand (800 concurrent players / 10 players per game / 4 games per instance = 20 instances). Below is your instance usage over a 24-hour period.
In this example, you decide to configure Amazon GameLift to automatically scale the number of instances up and down based on your current player demand. At 7:00 AM, you use 20 active instances, while at 10:00 PM, you use 162 active instances. Amazon GameLift only charges for the capacity you use. Therefore, you are only charged 20 instance hours from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, and 162 instance hours from 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM. The sum of all instances running each hour over the entire 24-hour period is 1,944 instance hours.
If you chose to use On-Demand instances, you would have been charged $0.311 per instance hour - the On-Demand price for an Amazon GameLift c4.xlarge instance running Linux in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Your total daily usage of 1,944 hours at $0.311 per hour sums to $605 per day, or $18,150 over a 30-day month.
If instead, you chose to use Spot instances, prices for your instances would have fluctuated throughout the day – but a good rule of thumb is that Spot instances running Linux are on average 70% cheaper than the same On-Demand instances. If you did see a 70% savings, your costs would be $181 per day, or $5,430 over a 30-day month.
If Amazon GameLift didn’t offer Auto-Scaling, but instead required you to pay for servers that run continuously all month, then your instance fees would have been $1,209 per day ($0.311 * 162 instances * 24 hours) or $36,270 over a 30-day month. With Auto-Scaling, On-Demand instances would have saved you $18,120 per month, a 50% reduction over servers that run continuously all month, and Spot instances would have saved you $30,840 per month, an 85% reduction over servers that run continuously all month.
| Cost of continuously running servers | $36,270 | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost w/Autoscaling and On-Demand | $18,150 | 50% savings over continuously running servers |
| Cost w/Auto Scaling and Spot (estimated) | $5,430 | 85% savings over continuously running servers |
We'll assume that the total amount of monthly data transfer in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region from all of your game servers to your game clients is 49.82 terabytes per month. Based on standard Data Transfer rates in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region, your cost for 49.82 terabytes of data transfer is $6,776 per month.
| Monthly Data Transfer |
Quantity | Price | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
First 1 GB |
1 GB |
$0.000 per GB |
$0 |
Up to 10 TB |
9.999 TB |
$0.140 per GB |
$1,400 |
Next 40 TB |
39.82 TB |
$0.135 per GB |
$5,376 |
Total |
49.82 TB |
|
$6,776 |
As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon GameLift for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive the following benefits each month for one year:
- 125 hours per month of Amazon GameLift c4.large On-Demand instance usage, plus 50 GB EBS General Purpose (SSD) storage
- 15 GB per month of bandwidth out, aggregated across all AWS services
In addition to Amazon GameLift, Amazon offers a growing selection of cross-platform building blocks for game developers. Whether we’re helping developers unlock the power of the cloud with Amazon Web Services, build the next global blockbuster with the Amazon Lumberyard game engine, or connect a massive community of players with Twitch, we work tirelessly to help teams focus on their creative vision, not their infrastructure.
