Amazon recently launched a new AWS offering for video games. This set of products and services combines together different cloud-based technology solutions for building, managing, and launching games after they go live.
“Developers would rather be building fun, innovative games that delight players, versus spending time and effort handling infrastructure. They need servers that can scale with tens of millions of players anywhere in the world at the lowest possible cost,” wrote software engineer Chris Lee and AWS marketing lead David Holladay. “Also, they need to optimize player lifetime value with databases that can process terabytes to petabytes of ever-changing data, analytics solutions that can access that data with millisecond latency, and machine learning that can translate insights into new, immersive gameplay.”
Amazon’s new AWS service for games is made up of six components. A cloud development toolset, game server management solutions, game security, live operations, analytics, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Amazon says that several companies have already started using its services.
Amazon will also be introducing new back-end management solutions: Amazon GameSparks and AWS GameKit. These tools aim to make behind-the-scenes services for games more efficient.
The Profit‘s Take:
When people talk about cloud gaming, this is what we should be referring to, not playing video games through a web browser. That has failed and is dead. Nobody should be talking about that when they discuss cloud gaming anymore. It doesn’t matter if Amazon is renaming an existing product or launching a new product, this just looks like smart marketing. I imagine this is just a rebrand of an existing product stack (likely what we used to call infrastructure-as-a-service). You have an industry that’s growing, so you might as well sell something to the universe of game developers, especially if your competitors are offering something similar.
You wrote:
“When people talk about cloud gaming, this is what we should be referring to, not playing video games through a web browser. That has failed and is dead. Nobody should be talking about that when they discuss cloud gaming anymore.” Why? Why did it fail and why is it dead and gone? What difference does it make what the app on the device is for playing… browser versus game client native app?
“Cloud gaming” services like Google Stadia have failed. There just isn’t much of a market for rendering a game remotely and then streaming that to a local device. Instead, we should be talking about “cloud gaming” in the context of the cloud infrastructure that any developer of multiplayer games would use for example. That’s a more interesting segment of the gaming market.