Game developers are increasingly embracing changes in the industry and pushing the limits of what gaming experiences can offer. Rather than focusing on managing infrastructure, developers want to dedicate their time and creativity to building innovative and enjoyable games that captivate players.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recognises the importance of supporting customers through this shift. By offering tools that are well-suited for specific use cases, AWS aims to streamline the adoption of cloud technology and minimise the amount of resources and investment required to achieve a faster time to value.
We caught up with Chris Lee, Head of Immersive Technologies, AWS, to discuss how the company is transforming the gaming sector and bringing immersive experiences to traditional industries.
Globally, the gaming industry is poised to reach $321 billion in market value by 2026. So, how important is the role of cloud and data in terms of enabling this growth?
The cloud is an essential tool for game developers, especially as games have evolved from single-player experiences to globally connected live services that players integrate into their daily lives.
A recent industry study pointed out that around 70 percent of game developers indicated that the cloud is critical to creating their new games. Games have undergone a significant transformation from single-player experiences to globally connected live services that are a part of players’ daily lives, allowing them to interact with friends and enjoy new social experiences.
Games like Fortnite, for example, offer a range of diverse experiences, including the recent Travis Scott music concert that attracted a staggering 35 million concurrent participants.
Cloud technologies make such events possible, providing the necessary compute and storage resources to handle the massive scale of such experiences. As games continue to develop and expand, the cloud will be pivotal in driving future growth for game developers.
What is Amazon GameLift and how is it transforming the market?
Amazon GameLift is a specialised hosting solution for game servers that provides cloud servers for multiplayer games, handling the deployment, operation, and scaling of these servers.
It takes advantage of the capabilities of Amazon Web Services to deliver benefits such as reduced latency, shorter player wait times, and cost-efficiency.
Amazon GameLift enables game developers to integrate their build with our service, upload it to our servers, and run it worldwide. It provides everything they need, including player session management and matchmaking. We handle scaling up and down efficiently, ensuring that instances are utilized optimally based on peak usage during the day. Alternatively, we offer each component of GameLift as a standalone service, such as FleetIQ, which is a session management tool. This enables game developers to use their own servers or connect to the servers they have already created. We also provide our matchmaking service, FlexMatch, which is pre-connected to everything but can be customized by developers to fit their requirements.
We aim to be flexible and meet customers where they are, always working from their needs to ensure that they get exactly what they require from AWS.
Latency is a vital aspect in enabling smooth and immersive gaming experiences, how is AWS ensuring high performance and low latencies in these environments?
Some of our services in the gaming space are designed to be latency-aware, while we also possess a multitude of technologies and the most expansive global network, boasting 96 availability zones across 30 regions with plans to introduce 18 more availability zones and six more regions.
We are continuously improving our AWS cloud infrastructure, we take pride in offering the most extensive network compared to other cloud service providers.
One of our unique enablement technologies is the local zone, which is a small-scale data centre located in metropolitan areas, closer to player populations to cater to specific customer needs. We have enabled eight local zones for Amazon GameLift, resulting in reduced latency for one of our game customers from 80 milliseconds to 30 milliseconds, a critical improvement for their gaming experience.
Additionally, we offer other technologies such as wavelength, which connects to the mobile edge for 5G, allowing for sub-10 millisecond latency and connecting people to the edge of the cloud in a super-fast way.
What is AWS’s role in the future of the metaverse? What are your initiatives in this space?
In terms of the metaverse, our approach is quite similar to our other strategies. We will focus on laying the foundation and creating tools that will allow customers to build their own vision for the metaverse.
It’s exciting to see various companies such as Meta and Fortnite to offer different kinds of metaverse experiences, which are essentially digitally connected social events. Our objective is to expand our global network to ensure low latency for players and provide the extensive storage, compute, and infrastructure necessary to power these experiences in the future.
I anticipate a significant increase in the use of immersive technologies in the future. While we have focused mainly on gaming, immersive technologies have the potential to be used across various industries. For instance, customers today are interested in creating digital twins, and our IoT twin maker service can help them achieve that. Moreover, running complex simulations can help accelerate product development, increase understanding and awareness. Thus, I expect a surge in immersive tech experiences, such as AR and VR, richer games, and industrial simulations. AWS SimSpace Weaver is an excellent example of an industrial simulation space, where large-scale simulations of over a million entities and vast spaces like cities can help solve problems in areas such as city planning, medical services and emergency response among others.
