Amazon Web Services has recently announced GameLift, a platform that allows games to be built with any C++ or C# structure.

Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, and custom developed engines will work with GameLift.

One of the biggest benefits to GameLift is that developers can quickly scale their dedicated multiplayer game servers to support millions of players using Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure. Developers can utilize this platform without investing thousands of hours in upfront engineering.

“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.” – Chris Dury, General Manager, Amazon GameLift

My experience with online gaming started with connecting local computers together to play GTA 1 in the late ’90s. When I fast forward to the current era of gaming, there does show improvements, but when a large scale game is released, I usually see lag time take place when a large amount of users interact with the server.

This is one area that GameLift looks to improve upon. As more independent producers create compelling video games, consumers will be looking to connect with new formats for entertainment.

One example that AWS and Business Wire noted:

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.” – BR Choi, CEO of AON Interactive.

The interactive management system allows game producers to focus on the content, and allow AWS to work on the engineering to build systems that manage server infrastructure and scale capacity.

Additionally, Amazon GameLift is designed to protect your server space from frequently occurring network and transport layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These take place with application, websites and games online. It is key to avoid DDoS attacks, or have a backup ready in case one takes place. AWS allows users to configure the service to autoscale server capacity to absorb DDoS attacks without taking your players offline.

• Watch and learn more about Amazon GameLift with a YouTube playlist at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjd5NhkT3Lsj9a_jDDg6peKbbHkzw0132

• Dive into a case study by Proletariat at: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gamedev/streamline-case-study-amazon-gamelift/

Scan over IGN’s introduction to Amazon’s Lumberyard program via YouTube.