AWS for Games at GDC 2023

Over 28,000 developers, artists, visionaries, and storytellers came from around the world to meet, learn, share experiences, and celebrate the global video game industry at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco March 20 – 24. From the hundreds of breakout sessions, hallway conversations, massive expo floor, and after-hour parties, it’s hard to keep track of all the announcements and game developer news. This blog highlights the AWS for Games customer sessions, developer events, and product launches announced around GDC 2023.

Customer Sessions

AWS for Games customers had had a big presence at GDC this year, including nominations across multiple Game Developer Choice Award categories and breakout sessions. Stay tuned for follow up content on these sessions!

• FromSoftware – Elden Ring won three awards, including Best Design, Best Visual Art, and Game of the Year. The developer scaled the game without disruption to millions of players worldwide with a small but highly skilled team using AWS. Read the FromSoftware case study.
• Santa Monica Studio – a Sony first party studio won three awards for God of War Ragnarök, including Best Audio, Best Technology, as well as the Audience Award, which was selected through a public vote. The studio also presented a technical deep-dive on transitioning God of War: Ascension from a set of static, unmanaged Amazon EC2 hosts to a fully containerized, Terraform-managed Amazon ECS/AWS Fargate cluster within two and half weeks. After facing some unexpected challenges, the team deployed a new, lower cost, 100% infrastructure-as-code solution with zero downtime for users. Learn more about Game Server solutions on AWS.
• Nuverse – publisher of MARVEL SNAP, shared a behind-the-scenes look at how it partnered with Second Dinner and Amazon Web Services to bring together marketing, operational, and technical capabilities to launch and scale the Mobile Game of the Year to millions of players across the globe. Learn more about how to build a fully serverless game backend.
• Meta – walked through the history of its Oculus Studios and the journey to integrate with common Meta-supported solutions, including Amazon GameLift, to standardize its game hosting and matchmaking services. These solutions are allowing its studios to speed up development, reduce costs, and focus on making the next great multiplayer game. Learn more about Amazon GameLift.
• Small Impact Games – an independent game developer based in England, led a session on how it developed and released its looter shooter game Marauders leveraging managed AWS services. The small but mighty team shared tips on how to increase development speed, quality, and cost efficiencies using Amazon GameLift. Read the Small Impact Games case study.
• Amazon Games Studios – shared how it is adopting AWS Cloud Game Development solutions to enable its teams to build cloud development pipelines and deploy virtual development environments, empowering developer/creator teams to work anywhere in the world. With AWS Cloud Game Development solutions, the team was able to increase scalability, security, and agility. Learn more about Cloud Game Development solutions on AWS.

Developer event

In addition to announcing new products and telling customer stories, AWS for Games spent the week interacting with game developers across a variety of events and locations.

• Leading by Example: Celebrating Women in Games – over 300 people attended an event hosted by Amazon Web Services, Amazon Game Studios, and Women in Games International (WIGI) on March 20. The networking event included a panel moderated by Shannon Liao, who has reported on games for The Washington Post, CNN, Polygon, and The Verge. Panelists included Leanne Loombe, Head of External Games at Netflix, Namrata Gandhi from Amazon Game Studios, and Jane Hoffacker, CEO and Co-founder of Incredible Dream Studios. They shared experiences and advice on how to build a more inclusive industry. The conversation ranged from career pivots, to seeking mentorship, prioritizing profitability, and always trusting your gut when making decisions. Inspiring insights from this accomplished group of women was the perfect segue into a networking reception held at Twitch HQ in San Francisco.
• Databricks, AWS, and Slalom Party for Gaming – on March 21, developers joined Databricks, AWS, Slalom and their gaming peers for an evening of networking, food, and celebration of the gaming industry.
• MongoDB and AWS GameDay for Startups – teams of developers competed on March 23 at the AWS Startup Loft to test their skills implementing MongoDB Atlas on AWS to solve real-world gaming problems. Winners had the chance to win a MongoDB Startup promo package, MongoDB swag, and the opportunity to be a guest on the MongoDB Podcast.

Product Launches

AWS for Games is a portfolio of purpose-built solutions and services to help game developers build, run, and grow their games. Since launching the initiative last year at GDC, we’ve continued to announce new and solutions and features across our solution areas – cloud game development, game servers, live operations, game analytics, and game artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Following are the new AWS for Games product announcements highlighted during GDC 2023.

Game Servers

• Persistent World Game Hosting (Guidance) – helps game developers build persistent world games and host virtual worlds in the cloud using Amazon GameLift and serverless backend components. This Guidance includes infrastructure as code (IaC) automation, configuration scripts for setting up dependencies, and a sample Unity client/server implementation. Developers can use this architecture to get started with persistent virtual world game development on MacOS and Windows. Learn more.
• Amazon GameLift SDK Update – makes it easier for customers to integrate their Go and .NET 6 based game servers with the Amazon GameLift service. Amazon GameLift Server SDK now supports Unity 2020.3, Unreal 4.26, Go language, and custom C++ and C# engines. Learn more.
• Amazon GameLift Console Update – provides customers a more intuitive and efficient experience to manage and scale their game servers. The updated interface includes a redesigned navigation and over 80 new info panels to help developers configure their Amazon GameLift resources without ever needing to leave the console. We also added the ability to create custom dashboards, more information on customer game server groups, instance pricing history, and samples to set up Amazon GameLift resources and FlexMatch rule sets. Learn more.

Live Operations

• Guidance for In-Game Achievement with Amazon GameSparks – enables developers to build an Achievement system using Amazon GameSparks (Preview) and Amazon DynamoDB. Developers can use this guidance to define Achievements and the required metrics to unlock them, as well as instrument their game clients to send metric updates when players complete in-game tasks. Achievement progress is validated server-side and automatically unlocks for players once completed. Learn more.
• Guidance for Matchmaking with Amazon GameSparks – helps developers implement real-time multiplayer matchmaking through Amazon GameSparks (Preview) using Amazon GameLift FlexMatch. It includes all the architecture and code required to configure and initiate FlexMatch matchmaking through GameSparks to group players together, and to place grouped players into games hosted on pre-configured Amazon GameLift servers. This Guidance can also be used to create a standalone matchmaker game server integration for developers using Amazon GameLift FleetIQ. Learn more.
• Guidance for Friends Lists with Amazon GameSparks – demonstrates how developers can build a Friends list system for their game using Amazon GameSparks (Preview) and Amazon DynamoDB. This guidance provides support for setting a display name, sending friend requests, accepting or rejecting requests, and retrieving a list of friends for a player. Developers can use the provided tooling to deploy the sample code and resources into their AWS accounts. Learn more.
• Heroic Labs Social Infrastructure for Games on AWS – enables developers to collaboratively operate, manage, and monitor Nakama instances across the organization at scale. Nakama is a managed AWS Partner solution providing distributed social and real-time servers for games and apps and includes an extensive set of services for users, data storage, and real-time client/server communication; as well as specialized APIs like real-time multiplayer, groups/guilds, and chat. Learn more.

Game AI/ML

• Guidance for Game Tech Cohort Modeler on AWS – enables developers to bring together and merge different types of datasets into a single, consolidated behavioral profile of their players to gain further insights into how players interact, participate, and socialize with other players in the game community. The Cohort Modeler categorizes and aggregates player metrics into individual player groupings, based on different types of metric data, including in-game metrics, in-game behaviors, and financial transactions. Deeper understanding of player behavior informs ongoing design and development decisions. Learn more.

Final Takeaways

GDC remains the place for the worldwide game development community to come together to celebrate, innovate, and continue to push our industry forward. Each year brings something new, but one thing is certain – GDC is back and we can’t wait to see it grow bigger, better, and even more accessible and inclusive in 2024. To learn more about how game developers are transforming game workloads and experiences with AWS, visit https://thinkwithwp.com/games/.