Publishers including Activision (Destiny 2), Supercell (Clash Royale), and Ubisoft (For Honor) are innovating with AWS to delight players around the world.
SEATTLE — March 19, 2018 — Today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced that more than 90 percent of the world’s biggest public game companies*, including Activision, Supercell, and Ubisoft are using AWS. Players demand flawless technical execution, constant innovation, and seamless online experiences from their games, and AWS helps game makers invent on behalf of their customers at every stage of development – from production and highly-scalable multiplayer infrastructure management, to live service operations, Twitch integrations, innovations with Alexa voice-enabled gameplay, and massive-scale machine learning.
Published by Activision and created by Bungie, Destiny 2 was the #2 selling video game in North America of 2017. The developers recognized the power of voice to provide players with a natural way to explore the world of Destiny 2. With the Ghost Skill, players who own Alexa-enabled devices can use voice commands to discover their next objective, manage their characters’ inventory, or partner up with friends in the game. For Activision and Bungie, as well as a myriad of other developers, the voice is a new frontier for games. “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 Consumer Marketing. “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, Clash of Clans, and Boom Beach, uses AWS’s 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, Supercell. “Through the use of AWS infrastructure, we are able to invest more than 45 billion in-game events and 10TB of data per day, empowering us to optimize and fine-tune our games to deliver amazing experiences to players around the world.”
Ubisoft develops blockbuster PC and console games, and when it needed to 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, to give their players a fast, reliable online experience. “For Honor hit a glass ceiling with the performance of our original meshed peer-to-peer networking solution, resulting in stability issues with our four-versus-four multiplayer modes,” said Damien Kieken, Game Director, Ubisoft. “Transitioning to dedicated servers with Amazon GameLift allowed us to eliminate several matchmaking and connectivity issues while improving the core For Honor player experience across all platforms.”
Amazon Game Tech at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018
Amazon will showcase end-to-end solutions for game developers at GDC (South Hall Booth #1001), helping them develop, scale, operate, and commercialize their games on any platform. Developers can learn how to find untapped growth in Twitch’s global community through the analytics of Twitch Insights, while deepening their engagement with broadcasters through Twitch Extensions. Developers can also learn firsthand how Activision and Bungie created the Ghost Skill for Alexa, in addition to exploring how they can use Amazon Lex and Amazon Polly machine learning technologies for text, voice, and natural language conversations to automate the scripting and speech of thousands of lines of dialogue, innovate game experiences, and remove thousands of hours of development. Developers can harness the power of AWS’s easy-to-use, massive-scale reinforced machine learning system, Amazon SageMaker, to reduce production times, detect cheating, and automate Quality Assurance. Developers like Ubisoft and Illfonic will also demonstrate how they operate their multiplayer servers and live service games with powerful scaling and analytics tools from Amazon GameLift and GameSparks. The Amazon Lumberyard team will demo how to build cloud-connected games using Cloud Gems, the Amazon GameOn team will show developers how they can easily build cross-platform competitions into their games, and Amazon’s retail team will also be on hand to help gamemakers reach customers and grow their businesses on Amazon.com.
For a complete look at Amazon’s presence at GDC including more than 30 demos, and dozens of workshops, please visit this page.
About Amazon Web Services
For nearly 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 100 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 54 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.