Why Small Impact Games shifted to cloud-based infrastructure on AWS for ‘Marauders’

Learn how the developer improved performance at scale while going fully autonomous

As an independent video game developer, Small Impact Games (SIG) is accustomed to making the most of its resources to create player-centric experiences. Based in Leicester, England, the studio’s 12-person team has contributed to 22 different titles since its 2012 founding. In gearing up for the release of its latest project – first-person multiplayer game ‘Marauders’ – SIG opted to adopt a more flexible approach to infrastructure and leveraged Amazon GameLift for scalable, dedicated game hosting on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With Amazon GameLift elastically deploying and operating AWS servers, the SIG team was well prepared for the game’s traffic fluctuations once they invited players to begin testing builds. Reaching a global pool of testers, SIG logged 3,000 concurrent users in the closed alpha and 7,000 concurrent users in the closed beta, with the game remaining performant on the backend throughout. When the company hit its predefined bandwidth, it was able to quickly scale.

“You hear stories about games where the whole system will just bottom out because of capacity, but we’ve never seen that or been close to it,” said James Rowbotham, SIG Lead Developer. “Even in our busiest points, we were matchmaking in 30 seconds, and everyone was having a great time. Scaling was never a concern with AWS.”

The SIG team began transforming its game development environment with AWS in July 2020. Over the course of 16 months, the studio integrated several fully managed AWS services, including AWS AppSync, which creates serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs that simplify application development through a single endpoint to securely query, update, or publish data. In addition to gaining elasticity, the managed services helped SIG control its infrastructure, and eliminate dependency on a third party to keep it running.

“Using AWS, we can be fully autonomous,” noted Michell Small, SIG Managing Director.

Shifting to a cloud-based development approach on AWS also better equipped SIG developers to improve the performance of ‘Marauders.’ Using Amazon DynamoDB, a fully serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at scale, SIG added a persistent gear feature that lets players collect and keep items across different gaming sessions. Amazon QuickSight, powered by machine learning, made it easier for the team to understand collected data and identify patterns to guide development initiatives.

Following successful alpha and beta tests, ‘Marauders’ launched in October 2022 as an early access release on Steam, so gamers can purchase and play the title while its development continues. With largely positive reviews, more than 350,000 copies have been sold and a Discord channel dedicated to the game has more than 60,000 members.

Going forward, SIG sees the potential for additional growth with the flexibility and speed gained using AWS. Rowbotham concluded, “AWS gives you so much for such little work, which is perfect for us.”

Read the full case study about how Small Impact Games worked with AWS on Mauraders.

AWS for Games transforms game workloads with purpose-built cloud services and solutions, such as Amazon GameLift. To learn more, visit: https://thinkwithwp.com/gametech/