More than 90 percent of the world’s largest game companies use Amazon Web Services, which offloads online gaming infrastructure tasks to Amazon’s giant cloud computing resources.
Amazon said that top games from Activision’s Destiny 2 to Supercell’s Clash Royale rely on its cloud infrastructure to handle the ebbs and flows of demand on cloud-connected data centers. The statistic is based on market researcher Newzoo’s list of the top 25 game companies.
Amazon said that modern games require flawless technical execution, constant innovation, and seamless online experiences. AWS offloads the task for running the game so that game makers can concentrate on making a great experience.
They can also use the infrastructure of AWS to innovate at every stage of development — from production to livestreaming via Twitch. AWS can support scalable multiplayer infrastructure management, live service operations, Twitch integrations, innovations with Alexa voice-enabled gameplay, and massive-scale machine learning.
Bungie and Activision’s Destiny 2 tapped Alexa voice recognition via the Ghost Skill, which enabled players to use voice commands to discover their next objective, manage their characters’ inventory, or partner up with friends in the game.
“Voice provides a new way for gamers to engage with Destiny 2, and we’ve been encouraged by the feedback we’ve received so far on the Destiny 2 Ghost skill,” said Ian Trombetta, Activision vice president of consumer marketing, in a statement. “The tools provided through the Alexa Skills Kit made it easy to build and innovate with Alexa.”
Supercell, the mobile gaming company behind some of the world’s most popular games, including Clash Royale and Clash of Clans, uses AWS’ database and analytics services, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon CloudFront, to improve their games based on player telemetry data.
“At Supercell, we see massive benefits from running our analytics pipeline on AWS, which allows us to support more than 100 million players every month,” said Sami Yliharju, cloud services lead at Supercell, in a statement. “Through the use of AWS infrastructure we are able to ingest more than 45 billion in-game events and 10 terabytes of data per day, empowering us to optimize and fine tune our games to deliver amazing experiences to players around the world.”
When it needed take its online action game For Honor from peer-to-peer networking to dedicated servers, Ubisoft turned to Amazon GameLift, a dedicated game server hosting and matchmaking solution built on AWS.
Amazon is doing a variety of announcements and talks at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.