Sloclap migrated Rematch with 0 downtime using Amazon GameLift Servers

For Sloclap, the stakes were clear from the moment the news arrived. In early December 2025, the studio learned that the server hosting provider running Rematch game servers was being acquired and would be transitioning to a new company with tight deadlines. Rematch is a technically demanding real-time football game that depends on reliable, low-latency connections, where network instability can directly affect the player experience. For a live service game like Rematch, even a brief disruption can lead to negative reviews, lost players, and damage to both current and future revenue. “Our gamers are really demanding customers,” said Nicolas Brigand, lead backend engineer at Sloclap. “If the servers are down for just a couple of hours, they’ll quickly move to something else, to the competition. You’ll have bad press.”

Sloclap’s previous server hosting provider used a hybrid model with a baseline of bare metal servers and added third-party cloud capacity from multiple providers when demand increased. The model gave Sloclap limited access to the machines running the game, making custom tooling, debugging, and operational improvements slow and constrained. Sloclap also used Network Next, a third-party network optimization tool, to improve routing for some players with poor connections. With only 4 months to find, develop, and test a new solution—and complete the migration while the game remained fully live—Sloclap needed to find a safer, faster way to move players with confidence. It needed a provider that would deliver the infrastructure to give its team real access, observability, and control. The company turned to AWS and Code Wizards Group to design and implement the migration under a tight deadline.

Code Wizards Group brought 24 years of games technology experience and had helped migrate Apex Legends to Amazon GameLift Servers in what it describes as one of the largest game server migrations to date. The AWS Partner had already worked with Sloclap on a technical evaluation of Rematch before launch, and AWS recommended Code Wizards Group for migration support. The Amazon GameLift team also coordinated support from more than 40 people across its account, solutions architecture, and service teams, who worked directly with Sloclap and Code Wizards Group throughout the migration. Working with Sloclap, Code Wizards Group supported capacity planning, region selection, instance type testing, observability, alerting, and runbooks. Code Wizards Group also embedded an engineer with Sloclap early in the engagement and maintained a 24-7 command center during migration, supported by the AWS account team throughout, followed by around-the-clock support for 3 months.

Sloclap moved Rematch game servers to Amazon GameLift Servers. Sloclap’s game backend runs on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, handling player account management, allocation routing, and matchmaking through Amazon GameLift Servers FlexMatch, a customizable matchmaking service for multiplayer games. Amazon CloudWatch, an intelligent observability service that provides actionable insights across applications and infrastructure, supported the metrics that Code Wizards Group extended into custom dashboards and alarms. “Monitoring is quite a bit better than what we had before,” said Victor Watrelos, online programmer at Sloclap. “With AWS, if something goes wrong, we detect it way faster than before.” The Amazon GameLift Servers team also worked directly with Sloclap to develop new matchmaking features in response to feedback raised during the migration.

To reduce migration risk, Code Wizards Group helped Sloclap plan a staged rollout process that kept the previous provider and Amazon GameLift Servers running in parallel. Sloclap built a routing system that could send a chosen percentage of player allocations by region to either environment, giving the team a rollback option at every stage. Code Wizards Group supported the rollout plan through performance testing, instance right-sizing, region sequencing, and operational runbooks, helping Sloclap identify which metrics to monitor and how to respond if issues appeared during the live migration. This gave the teams a controlled path to move players gradually while keeping Rematch live.

Sloclap completed the full migration on February 21, 2026, after planning for a staged rollout that could have taken a week. Once the first production wave proved stable, the team accelerated from a 10 percent rollout to 100 percent of players on the same day. “It was just insanely smooth and seamless,” says Watrelos. “Everything was working, so we decided to move the percentage up, up, up, and it was okay.” The migration was completed with zero player downtime, and Rematch servers continued running at 60 frames per second. Sloclap also reduced hosting costs by 30–40 percent compared to the previous provider and removed Network Next after the AWS network reduced the number of players affected by poor connections.

The migration also gave Sloclap more control over its game server environment. The team can now connect to machine consoles directly, attach debugging tools, run local servers integrated into the Amazon GameLift Servers flow, and build custom tooling that was difficult to maintain before. Monitoring also improved. “There is definitely a benefit in the observability of the game servers in the sense that if there is something going wrong, we detect it way faster than before,” says Watrelos. One of the strongest outcomes was that players never noticed the change. “I think the biggest impact is the fact that it worked so well that there wasn’t really an impact,” says Watrelos. “We weren’t using it before, and on our first try, we could migrate all our players onto it, and they didn’t see anything.”

AWS Partner Code Wizards Group specializes in cloud infrastructure and live service support for games studios.