AWS For Games – An Exciting World!

Overview

“To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.” 

-Elon Musk 

The world of GameTech is experiencing industry-wide transformation. Game developers are pushing tech boundaries to develop constantly evolving gaming experiences to involve millions of players.  

AWS aligns game development capabilities (services, solutions, partners) against six solution areas: 

1. Cloud Game Development 
2. Game Servers 
3. Live Operations 
4. Game Analytics 
5. Game Security 
6. AI and Machine Learning  

Cloud Game Development

AWS facilitates building game development pipelines with teams located worldwide.  

• Let your game-developing team be residing in any part of the world.  
• The AWS global infrastructure allows you to build the game, test it and add content. 
• Match the demand by ramping up and down.  
• A cloud-build pipeline helps you monitor and safeguard your game IP. 

Game Servers

With AWS Game Servers, you can use AWS global infrastructure to provide your players with a low-latency gaming experience. You also do not have to worry about security and scalability aspects! 

• Low-latency player experience 

Gives you the freedom to host game servers where your players are located. This is possible because AWS has 26 regions with 84 availability zones and 17 local zones and continuously expanding to newer locations.  

• Scale with player traffic 

With the elastic compute solutions of AWS, you can deliver the same gaming experience to any number of players even during peak hours. This amazing service helps you to scale up when there is high player traffic, and also scale down when the player traffic is low. 

• Minimize operations 

Amazon GameLift is a dedicated game server hosting solution. It deploys, operates, and scales the cloud servers for multiplayer games. It helps you choose components from multiple hosting options. Another solution bundled with GameLift is FlexMatch, which is a fully managed customizable matchmaking solution. 

• Resilience, built-in 

Every system is prone to a small number of failures or faults. AWS has got you covered even in such events. You can easily replace any failed hosts and use a different availability zone and region. All this is to ensure fault tolerance and high availability. 

Live Operations

Amazon GameSparks provides a fully managed game backend that helps you build a game backend while being worry-free about the server infrastructure.  

• It provides solutions for player identity and authorization, maintaining leaderboards and messaging.  
• As far as the game logic is concerned, you can use pre-built game features and extend it or you can create your logic.  
• You can use a test harness to verify cloud code logic, thereby saving time. 
• If you wish to extend your game’s functionality beyond GameSparks – you can integrate your game logic with Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda. 

Game Analytics

Understand the player behavior, grow and retain the engaged players by making effective design decisions with Game Analytics and Big Data Solutions. We at CloudThat offer training from AWS experts on Data Analytics – take a look at the details here.  

• Make data-driven analyses for targeted marketing and track resources. 
• AWS can help match the volume and velocity of data generated based on the number of players. All this, at no extra cost – paying only when you need it.  
• Be worry-free since your game data is in safe hands – thanks to AWS’s low latency, redundant networking, and high throughput. 

Game Security

Security is crucial as it involves both your game and player data. AWS offers a suite of products to help protect game infrastructure, robust monitoring, and data security, enabling players to enjoy safe environments. Get trained by our AWS Security experts! 

• Your game data that leaves AWS facilities and moves across AWS global network and datacenters are automatically encrypted. 
• AWS has robust tools to protect your game servers and infrastructure from DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. 
• AWS offers a bunch of products to keep a watch on your game’s health, its utilization, anomalies, if any, player engagement, etc. 

AI and Machine Learning

Game developers can use AWS Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning services to build their games. Take a look at the AWS AI and ML courses we offer!  

• Make the best use of AWS’s ML services like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, etc. to help understand player behavior. 
• Game Analytics and BI – AWS offers no-code ML tools such as Amazon SageMaker Canvas and AutoML for generating player predictions. 

Are you excited to build your own game yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comment box! 

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