AWS for Games Blog

AWS for Games at Gamescom 2023

Gamescom, the annual video game trade fair and conference held in Cologne, Germany, came roaring back in 2022 with over 265,000 consumers and industry professionals coming together to interact and get a glimpse into the future of gaming. The conference, one of the largest gaming events in the world, offers a platform for game developers, publishers, hardware manufacturers, and cloud providers for games to showcase their latest products, make announcements, and provide hands-on demonstrations to attendees. If this year’s Games Developer Conference (GDC) is any indicator, Gamescom should be even bigger and better in 2023. This blog post highlights AWS for Games presence at Gamescom 2023 including new product launches and customer stories, as well as how to meet with one of our industry experts at the event.

Developer Events

AWS for Games will spend the week interacting with game developers across a variety of events and locations at Gamescom.

  • Australian Reception at Gamescom 2023 –hosted by Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA), AWS is proud to support the Australian Reception at Gamescom 2023 where 25 Australian game studios will present their upcoming titles. The event will give attendees the opportunity to network and learn from other game developers and industry experts in order to grow the Australian gaming community. Learn more and register for the event.
  • Women in Games: Celebrating Your Achievements & How to Effect Change – leaders from studios, startups and indies alike will come together to join in a discussion on the state of the games industry for women, including how to celebrate victories and create lasting affirmations to career development in the gaming industry. Hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Games, and Women in Games International (WIGI), the event includes a panel discussion with women executives from Embracer Group, Thoughtfish GmbH, Women in Games International (WIGI), and Amazon Game Studios. Learn more and register for the event.

Customer Stories

Learn how game studios of all sizes use AWS for Games services and solutions, including generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), to build, run, and grow their games across the globe.

  • Scenario Incorporated – founded to revolutionize the way in-game and marketing assets are produced for studios, Scenario went all in on AWS to assist artists at studios across 40 countries with approximately 100,000 generative AI images produced each day. Learn more about how Scenario built their Gen AI solution with Amazon ECS.
  • Second Dinner – an independent game studio founded in 2018, the studio wanted to quickly launch and scale MARVEL SNAP, the mobile game of the year in 2022, while focusing their small engineering team on improving the game experience. With Amazon GameLift FlexMatch, Second Dinner and Nuverse were able to match and connect millions of players around the world. Learn how Second Dinner managed the smoothest technical launch they ever experienced with AWS.
  • Travian Games – founded in Germany in 2005 and known for strategy games such as Travian: Legends, Crowfall, and Rail Nation, Travian Games needed a new solution to support its 25 million registered players and make it simpler for its developers to focus on creating new features. Learn how Travian Games used AWS for Games purpose-built game development capabilities to implement its initiative. 
  • Whatwapp – founded in Milan in 2013 by a small team of university students, Whatwapp’s apps have more than 29 million downloads, with averages of 900,000 monthly and 300,000 daily users. The company needed a solution to more easily share and manage knowledge, such as database and authentication, and features, such as leaderboards and player-to-player challenge matchmaking. Learn how Whatwapp standardized their gamine infrastructure with AWS.
  • Behaviour Interactive – the largest independent Canadian video game developer, Behaviour grew Dead by Daylight, their multiplayer horror game, by 38 million players in three years with AWS and Amazon GameLift. As the game has grown in popularity, Behaviour needed a more scalable, reliable game-server hosting solution. Learn how Behaviour Interactive continues to deliver high-quality player experiences across nine regions globally use Amazon GameLift.
  • Meta’s Oculus Studios – the division that publishes popular multiplayer VR games, including “Beat Saber”, Meta’s Oculus Studios aimed to accelerate integration of future studios into their game ecosystem, increase support across all studios, provide more scalable solutions, and improve resiliency and reliability for every game title. Learn more.
  • Frag Lab – founded in 2017, Frag Lab a video game development studio based in Kyiv, needed a cost-effective solution to launch and scale their first game, Shatterline, a fast-paced multiplayer FPS. With Amazon GameLift, Frag Lab was able to support players around the world while their team operated remotely during COVID and the Ukraine war. Learn how Frag Lab scaled to two million players in five weeks using Amazon GameLift.

Product Launches

AWS for Games is a portfolio of purpose-built capabilities to help game developers build, run, and grow their games. By listening to diverse customer perspectives and working backwards from their needs, we’ve continued to release new purpose-built capabilities for game developers, most recently for game artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The following are the new AWS for Games product announcements leading up to Gamescom 2023.

Cloud Game Development

  • Epic Unreal Engine 5 Workstations on AWS – seamlessly delivers high fidelity, immersive 3D experiences, across the globe without the need for expensive hardware and physical workstations to host and render the 3D data. This Amazon Machine Image (AMI) comes pre-loaded with the latest release of UE 5.2 and all its prerequisites so you can get straight to creating in the cloud with no downloads or installs. Learn more.
  • Remāngu Workstations on AWS – helps developers build a virtual game studio in the cloud to collaborate remotely, securely, and hassle-free with their teams. The platform offers a variety of tools and services, including integrated CI/CD and playtest environments, powerful graphic workstations, and scalable game development infrastructure based on AWS. Learn more.

Live Operations

  • Guidance for Custom Game Backend Hosting on AWS – allows developers to deploy secure and scalable backend features to support cross-platform online multiplayer elements of their games. The new guidance supports guest identities and various game platform identity systems, and can be extended to additional game platforms, such as game consoles. In addition, this Guidance provides software development kits (SDKs) and sample code for Unreal Engine 5, Unity 2021 (and up), and Godot 4 game engines. Read the blog to learn more.

Game Servers                                                                                 

  • Amazon GameLift Unreal Engine 5 Support – customers can now integrate their Unreal Engine 5 based game servers using the updated GameLift Server SDK. In addition, the Amazon GameLift Server SDK with Unreal Engine 5 plugin is built to work with Amazon GameLift Anywhere, allowing developers to test and iterate Unreal Engine game builds faster and manage game sessions across any server hosting infrastructure. Learn more.
  • Amazon GameLift AL2023 Support – Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) takes a security-by-default approach to improve security posture. AL2023 also improves the development experience for customers building on Unreal Engine 5 by natively supporting updates to the core tool chain packages, including glibc. With this release, Amazon GameLift now supports new game servers that run on Windows 2016, Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) and AL2023. Learn more.
  • Amazon GameLift SDK5 Updates – updates to the Amazon GameLift Server SDK now makes it even easier for developer building Unity-based games. Customers can use the Unity Editor’s built-in package manager to import the new Amazon GameLift C# Server SDK plugin with either .NET Standard or .NET Framework profiles for their Unity games. With this release, Amazon GameLift Server SDK now supports Unity 2022.3, Unreal Engine 4.26, Unreal Engine 5.1, Go language, and custom C++ and C# engines. Learn more.
  • Amazon GameLift Support for AWS Graviton – with this release, Amazon GameLift customers can now leverage the latest generation compute-optimized AWS Graviton instances which deliver up to 60% better price/performance over comparable fifth-generation x86-based instances. Amazon GameLift now supports eight new instance families powered by Graviton, including C7g which enables the best price performance for compute-intensive gaming workloads. These instances are ideal for Linux-based workloads written in popular game programming languages, such C++, C# and C, and for Unreal Engine based game servers. Learn more about how to increase performance and cost savings using AWS Graviton-based instances with Amazon GameLift.

Game AI/ML

  • Modulate.ai ToxMod Voice Moderation on AWS – built on advanced machine learning technology and designed with player safety and privacy in mind, ToxMod triages voice chat to flag bad behavior, analyzes the nuances of each conversation to determine toxicity, and enables moderators to quickly respond to each incident by supplying relevant and accurate context. Learn more about ToxMod’s voice-native moderation solution on AWS.
  • Databricks Lakehouse Gaming Toxicity Detection Solution Accelerator – helps developers detect toxic comments in real time to improve the user experience and foster healthier gaming communities. The solution uses natural language processing techniques to flag questionable comments for moderation to enable real-time detection of toxic comments within in-game chat, easily integrate into existing community moderation processes, and seamlessly add new sources of gamer data (such as streams, files or voice data).  Learn more about Community Health Solutions on AWS.
33 purpose-built capabilities to help game developers build, run, and grow their games

33 purpose-built capabilities to help game developers build, run, and grow their games.

Conclusion 

Ultimately, Gamescom is one of the few opportunities each year for the global community of gamers to come together in-person to immerse themselves in the latest gaming experiences, and connect with the industry professionals shaping the future of interactive entertainment.

To learn more about how game developers are transforming game workloads and experiences with AWS, book a meeting with our industry experts located in Hall 02.1 Stand B040 or visit the AWS for Games homepage.