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.