GameLift Free Tier includes 125
hours per month of Amazon GameLift c3.large, c4.large and c5.large (combined) depending on region for On-Demand instance usage.
Amazon Web Services China Region • 12 Months Free
Amazon GameLift FlexMatch
Unlocking the ability for developers to use a fully managed multiplayer matchmaker with any game server solution of their choice. Learn more »
Amazon GameLift is a dedicated game server hosting solution that deploys, operates, and scales cloud servers for multiplayer games. Whether you’re looking for a fully managed solution, or just the feature you need, GameLift leverages the power of Amazon Web Services to deliver optimal latency, low player wait times, and cost savings.
“Having to manage enough servers to handle the load of potentially hundreds of thousands of players would have been a huge amount to handle on our own. With Amazon Gamelift FleetIQ, we can quickly provision large amounts of server capacity, ensuring we have servers ready to go for anyone around the world. We don’t have to add additional staff to manage infrastructure, and this helps improve the bottom line not just from overhead, but also from server hosting by tapping into unused EC2 Spot instances at a discount when compared to On-Demand pricing. We have less to worry about and can focus more on Tetris and our players, while scaling with the growth of the game.” - Stephen Detwiler, Co-Founder and CTO, N3TWORK
“For Modern Combat 5, reliable and highly scalable game servers are essential to deliver a great multiplayer experience. By easily integrating Amazon GameLift FleetIQ as a backend with our in-house matchmaker, we can maintain complete control to provide players with well matched, low latency game sessions, all while optimizing costs. Since implementing GameLift FleetIQ, servers automatically scale with fluctuating player demand, and preliminary estimates already show cost saving of 20% - 40%.” -Nicolae Georgescu, Studio Online Lead, Gameloft
“At Behaviour Interactive, the player experience comes first. That’s why we entrust our dedicated servers for Dead by Daylight to Amazon GameLift, helping us focus our efforts on bringing new and exciting features to players with very little ongoing infrastructure maintenance.”
“Transitioning from meshed peer-to-peer networks to dedicated servers with Amazon GameLift allowed us to eliminate several stability and connectivity issues while improving the core For Honor player experience across all platforms.”
Benefits
45 ms
global median latency
GameLift provides dedicated, reliable game servers for seamless gameplay experiences with optimal latency while providing cost savings. Leveraging EC2 compute capacity, 22 regions, and 60 instance types, GameLift offers an elastic, global scalable service for computing. Learn more »
Up to 70% savings
compared to existing on-premises deployments
Autoscale with FlexMatch to meet player demand and connect up to 200 players in a single game session on low latency server instance available. Learn more »
Flexibility
to use either as a managed solution or with existing tools
GameLift caters to you, whether you want everything the service has to offer or only specific modular pieces. Building a game from scratch? Use all of GameLift. Run containerized game server builds or want to reuse your existing server management layer? Use GameLift FleetIQ to provide you with just the low-cost viable Spot instances. Need just a matchmaker? Use GameLift FlexMatch to form matches for your players regardless of whether you run your game servers peer-to-peer, on-premises, or on cloud compute primitives. Learn more »
Use cases
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Managed servers
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Flexible to fit your stack
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Migrate from P2P servers
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Support cross-play
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Competitive matchmaking
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Managed servers
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Let GameLift do the heavy-lifting of deploying and managing dedicated game servers so you can focus on developing games. GameLift reduces the burden of scaling servers with fluctuating player demand while providing low latency and low cost. The example architecture describes this process.
A game session request is sent after platform and player authentication. GameLift FlexMatch searches for like-minded players to join the game, creates a matchmaking ticket, and places players into the matching process. The match is determined and the matchmaker passes the information to the GameLift game session placement queue. A search occurs for an available fleet instance that provides the lowest latency to the player. The fleet instance is notified of the intent to begin a game, which exposes an IP address, and the chosen server listens on a particular IP port. The IP address and port are returned to the game when the match is set up.
The match is created and allows matchmaking results to be passed back to the game. The game has the IP address and port to contact, and a session token for the GameLift game server. The game now makes a connection to the GameLift game server assigned to the player’s match, players arrive, and fun begins for the players. Get started with the developer guide »
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Flexible to fit your stack
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GameLift provides the flexibility specific to your needs. You can choose to use GameLift FleetIQ to onboard server workloads to the cloud using your existing tools or software, independent of adopting any other managed GameLift features. Gradually moving live games or launching new games to the cloud with the cost savings of EC2 Spot instances possible only with GameLift FleetIQ. You can save on cost, speed time to market, and deliver a reliable player experience.
The following diagram illustrates the role of GameLift FleetIQ when it is working with Amazon EC2 for game hosting. It locates the optimal available game server to host a game session that provides players an optimal gameplay experience. For game hosting, the best resources deliver the highest hosting viability at a low cost. GameLift FleetIQ enables this by allowing only optimal instances types in the Autoscaling group and placing new game sessions effectively across the group's available resources. Get started with the developer guide »
“Having to manage enough servers to handle the load of potentially hundreds of thousands of players would have been a huge amount to handle on our own. With Amazon Gamelift FleetIQ, we can quickly provision large amounts of server capacity, ensuring we have servers ready to go for anyone around the world. We don’t have to add additional staff to manage infrastructure, and this helps improve the bottom line not just from overhead, but also from server hosting by tapping into unused EC2 Spot instances at a discount when compared to On-Demand pricing. We have less to worry about and can focus more on Tetris and our players, while scaling with the growth of the game.”
Stephen Detwiler, Co-Founder and CTO, N3TWORK
"For Modern Combat 5, reliable and highly scalable game servers are essential to deliver a great multiplayer experience. By easily integrating Amazon GameLift FleetIQ as a backend with our in-house matchmaker, we can maintain complete control to provide players with well matched, low latency game sessions, all while optimizing costs. Since implementing GameLift FleetIQ, servers automatically scale with fluctuating player demand, and preliminary estimates already show cost saving of 20% - 40%.”
Nicolae Georgescu, Studio Online Lead, Gameloft
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Migrate from P2P servers
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Peer-to-Peer and listen servers are often viewed as a low-latent, cost-effective solution for games. However, they can create poor player experiences with host interruptions and dependencies on your players having good internet connections. GameLift customers like Ubisoft, Behaviour Interactive, and Illfonic migrated their P2P or listen server infrastructure to GameLift to achieve low cost and low latency dedicated game servers. The below example illustrateshow Behaviour Interactive migrated to GameLift for their game, Dead by Daylight. Get started with the Developer Guide »
“Transitioning from meshed peer-to-peer networks to dedicated servers with Amazon GameLift allowed us to eliminate several stability and connectivity issues while improving the core For Honor player experience across all platforms.”
For Honor team, Ubisoft
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Support cross-play
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GameLift supports cross-platform play to connect your community and broaden your player pool of potential matches. Learn more below on how Metalhead Software introduced cross-platform play for players with GameLift in Super Mega Baseball series. Get started with GameLift now »
"Mitigating the impacts of latency is also extremely important for Super Mega Baseball. Fast reaction speeds and real-time gameplay are integral to making players really feel like they are on the field...Using Amazon GameLift we can ensure that latency is always below 120 ms, and players are matched to the closest possible data center to achieve average rates of only 40 ms."
Christian Zuger, Co-Founder - Metalhead Software
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Competitive matchmaking
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Match players based on rules you define with Amazon GameLift FlexMatch. Whether you choose to build your matchmaking based on player skill, latency, or custom criteria, FlexMatch’s simple but powerful rules language makes it easy to quickly create robust player matchmaking.
FlexMatch pairs the matchmaking service with a customizable rules engine. Once a match is formed, FlexMatch hands the match details to a queue of your choice. The queue searches for available hosting resources on your Amazon GameLift fleets and starts a new game session for the match. Learn more in the developer guide »
“GameLift is powerful because it frees us up to think about those player facing features. Using a few simple configuration options, we can automate the scaling of game servers and cut down on the complexity of matchmaking players quickly and fairly.”
Nikolaus Pottler, DevOps Engineer - Iron Mountain Interactive
How GameLift fits into your game services architecture
Backend game infrastructure is generally made up of three components: a gateway to your services, game services, and game servers.
Gateway
The gateway helps protect your service from denial of service load levels by providing a scalable, load-balanced service to host your services API. It also provides a mechanism to authenticate users to your services. In the Amazon Web Services cloud, the Gateway services include Amazon API Gateway to host the API, and Amazon Cognito for authentication.
Game services
Game services provide basic multiplayer game support, like matchmaking, session directory, player data, and player analytics. With Amazon Web Services, you can use services like Amazon Lambda that provides serverless, scalable, and flexible compute, or features in services like Amazon GameLift FlexMatch, for matchmaking.
Game servers
Match players into game sessions and autoscale that start one, hundreds, or even thousands of instances simultaneously, without thinking about scaling with fluctuating player demand.
Featured GameLift customers
Dive into GameLift features like Autoscaling, FleetIQ, FlexMatch, Realtime Game Servers, and more.
