Amazon
Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today
announced that Amazon GameLift now supports games built with any C++ or
C# game engine, including Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, and
custom developed engines. With Amazon GameLift, developers can quickly
scale their dedicated multiplayer game servers to support millions of
players using AWS's highly available cloud infrastructure, without
investing thousands of hours in upfront engineering. AWS also announced
that Amazon GameLift includes new matchmaking functionality that
intelligently selects the closest available game server based on each
player's location, giving players the lowest possible latency by
leveraging AWS's broad global footprint. Game developers only pay for
the compute, storage, and bandwidth resources their games use, with no
upfront commitments or monthly contracts. To get started with Amazon
GameLift, visit aws.amazon.com/gamelift.
Expectations
for multiplayer games have never been higher. Gamers demand short wait
times to connect to games, imperceptible server latency, and bulletproof
stability. To meet these expectations, game developers have needed to
invest thousands of hours of engineering to build systems that manage
server infrastructure and scale capacity. Amazon GameLift is a managed
service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for
session-based multiplayer games. With Amazon GameLift, developers
simply add the Amazon GameLift SDK to their games, upload their game
servers, and launch the service in the AWS Management Console. The
service then automatically deploys game servers across the AWS Cloud and
starts connecting players to games. Amazon GameLift's new matchmaking
functionality continually scans available game servers around the world
and matches them against player requests to join games. If low-latency
game servers are not available, the service's autoscaling feature can
automatically start one, hundreds, or even thousands of game servers
across AWS's global regions. Autoscaling also eliminates wasted capacity
by stopping unused game servers in minutes, lowering Amazon GameLift
costs by an average of 50 percent. With Amazon GameLift, developers can
be confident that on day one that their multiplayer games can scale to
support millions of players, while maintaining the high performance
gamers expect.
"The
majority of leading game companies use AWS, and our customers have
consistently asked us for an easier way to deploy, operate, and scale
dedicated game servers for their multiplayer games," said Chris Dury,
General Manager, Amazon GameLift. "We built Amazon GameLift to save
developers time and money while delivering world-class experiences for
their players. We are excited to now offer Amazon GameLift's benefits to
more game developers by adding support for any C++ and C# game engine."
Gearbox
Software, the award-winning developer of blockbuster franchises
including Battleborn, Borderlands, and Brothers in Arms, is beginning to
deploy Amazon GameLift. "Now that Amazon GameLift is available for all
game engines, we're excited about its potential to help us deliver the
lightning-fast, seamless online multiplayer experiences our fans
demand," said Neil Johnson, Technical Director at Gearbox Software.
Independent
developer Proletariat uses Amazon GameLift to quickly deploy and manage
their multiplayer game servers. "For the team at Proletariat, the
choice was pretty simple - hire a team of engineers to spend months
building our own cloud infrastructure, or launch our game on Amazon
GameLift in a couple of days," said Seth Sivak, CEO of Proletariat.
"Amazon GameLift made it easy for us to inexpensively give our fans
world-class online experiences."
South Korea-based AON Interactive, a mobile game studio, is adopting Amazon GameLift for their next game codenamed, Project Road-99. A real-time, multiplayer racing game, Project Road-99 lets
players create and share their own tracks and compete with their
friends. "Amazon GameLift is helping AON develop fast, stable
multiplayer experiences for our players on mobile devices in any region
of the world, with incredibly low latency," said BR Choi, CEO of AON
Interactive. "Amazon GameLift's ability to smartly match players and
instantly scale capacity will help AON give our players the best
possible experience, while saving us time and money."
Developers can start using Amazon GameLift using the AWS Management Console or by downloading the SDK at aws.amazon.com/gamelift.
Amazon GameLift is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West
(Oregon), EU Central (Frankfurt), EU West (Ireland), Asia Pacific South
(Mumbai), Asia Pacific Northeast (Seoul and Tokyo), Asia Pacific
Southeast (Singapore) and South America East (São Paulo) Regions, with
additional AWS Regions coming soon.