Amazon GameLift Servers FAQs

Amazon GameLift Servers is a capability for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. You can deploy your first game server in the cloud in just minutes, saving up to thousands of engineering hours in upfront software development and lowering the technical risks that often cause developers to cut multiplayer features from their designs. Built on the AWS proven computing environment, Amazon GameLift Servers lets you scale high-performance game servers up and down to meet player demand. You pay only for the capacity you use, so you can get started whether you’re working on a new game idea or running a game with millions of players.

Amazon GameLift is a fully-managed service with game streaming and multiplayer game server capabilities. Amazon GameLift Servers enables developers with predictive game server scaling that supports 100 million concurrent players in a single game and 100 thousand player adds per second, and offers enterprise-grade security and matchmaking for the largest crowds. Amazon GameLift Streams helps developers stream games at up to 1080p resolution and 60 frames-per-second to any device with a browser. Using AWS’s global footprint and game optimized GPU instances, publishers can deploy and stream their game content in minutes, without modifications, and players can start gaming in seconds without perceivable lag or having to wait for installs. With high-scaling game server and smooth-gameplay streaming capabilities, Amazon GameLift helps developers to build, scale, and deliver the world's most demanding games.

Amazon GameLift Servers works with most multiplayer game genres.

Amazon GameLift Servers is designed for multiplayer games that have game sessions that begin and end within a specified time period. These can be multiplayer games in genres like first person shooters, MOBAs, fighting, racing, or sports.

Amazon GameLift Servers Realtime is ideal for those session-based multiplayer games that share small amounts of data amongst players and have low-complexity simulation. These attributes are typical of games in genres such as card games, mobile match 3, realtime strategy, role playing, or turn-based strategy games.

Amazon GameLift Servers is designed to work for latency-intolerant games. It introduces no additional latency during gameplay.

Once a player connects to a game server, all player-to-server communication is done directly between your game client and game server. Latency experienced during gameplay will depend upon the player's internet connection and their physical distance to the game server. You can reduce latency by positioning game servers in regions and local zones that are as close as possible to your players. Amazon GameLift Servers supports regions in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa and Australia so you can choose where to best deploy game servers for your players.

Yes. Amazon GameLift Servers supports Unreal Engine, Unity and custom C# and C++ game engines. Learn more about engine integration in the Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide.

You can quickly test Amazon GameLift Servers using our sample game. You can also find samples in our Integration Guides. Visit the Getting Started page to learn more.

Amazon GameLift Servers provides game engine plugins for both Unity and Unreal Engine. There are also server SDKs available for custom game engines written in C++, C# and Go programming languages. Amazon GameLift Servers supports game servers that run on Windows Server 2016 and Amazon Linux 2023. Amazon GameLift Servers Realtime supports JavaScript to customize server logic. Support for Amazon Linux 2 will end on June 30, 2025, see Amazon GameLift Servers Linux Server FAQ for more details.

Amazon GameLift Servers is agnostic to which platform the client runs on. It supports all major platforms and devices, including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, mobile, web, and AR/VR headsets. You can integrate any backend system with the Amazon GameLift Servers APIs for matchmaking, game session creation, and player session creation using the AWS SDKs. Game clients and game services (such as matchmaking or authentication) can use the Amazon GameLift Servers functionality in the AWS SDK to communicate with the Amazon GameLift Servers service and join players to games. The AWS SDK is available in C++, Java, .NET(C#), Go, Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript and other major languages.

Yes. Amazon GameLift Servers is built on open web standards, and is compatible with all major game platforms.

No, you are not required to authenticate players. However, you are required to provide a unique, non-personally identifiable player ID for each user. Learn more in the Integrating a Game Client section of the Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide. Your game backend must authenticate to your servers on Amazon GameLift Servers using your AWS credentials. To learn more about how to set up and configure AWS credentials, please visit the Set up an AWS account page in the Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide.

You can track performance and health metrics for your game servers to discover and investigate issues. You can debug fleets during build extraction, installation, and runtime validation by downloading fleet creation logs from the Events tab in the Amazon GameLift Servers Console. You can also remotely access individual instances in a fleet to inspect status, debug problems, or connect debugging tools. To remotely access instances, you can use either Windows Remote Desktop for Windows or SSH for Linux. Visit our Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide to learn more about debugging and Amazon GameLift Servers Anywhere.

Fleet-level aggregated data is generally available in the Amazon GameLift Servers console within ten minutes of collection and server-level aggregated data is generally available within five minutes of collection.

The Amazon GameLift Servers Console provides real-time dashboards to help you understand your player’s experience. You can also use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor all of your Amazon GameLift Servers resources and react to emergent issues. With CloudWatch, you can create at-a-glance dashboards and configure operational alarms to help identify issues before they impact your players. Amazon GameLift Servers metrics are automatically available in CloudWatch as long as your fleet is active. Learn more about CloudWatch metrics in the Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide.

The Amazon GameLift Servers matchmaking platform includes both FlexMatch and game session queues. FlexMatch lets you match players together based on rules you define. You can use FlexMatch to configure rule sets that group players together while balancing match quality and player wait time. FlexMatch results are automatically fed into a game session queue, which can intelligently select the closest available game server for the match based on each player’s location, giving players the lowest possible latency by leveraging AWS’s broad global footprint. Learn more about game session queues and FlexMatch in the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation.

Amazon GameLift Servers supports the full development lifecycle of containerized game servers, enabling consistent and secure deployments across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments on Amazon GameLift Servers instances. Containers package up the entire runtime environment - all the code, dependencies, and configuration files needed to run the game server, and developers can seamlessly move game server builds between their local machines for testing, staging environments, and production deployments on-premises or in the cloud. Using Amazon GameLift Servers instances allows you to quickly scale computing resources up or down to meet player demand without maintaining physical hardware.

While there is no limit on how long a game session on Amazon GameLift Servers can be, there are some considerations to take into account when it comes to long or persistent sessions. Amazon GameLift Servers provides session management for sessions of up to 200 players. Larger and longer sessions require a custom player session management solution using a separate database such as Amazon DynamoDB. It’s recommended to store the game session information in a database as well to provide your players a view to existing sessions. You can refresh the game session information centrally through the Amazon GameLift Servers APIs. Game servers on Amazon GameLift Servers have access to the IAM Role you’ve defined for your fleet, which allows accessing storage and databases such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB directly from the game server. For databases running in a private subnet inside your VPC, you will need to build a secured API layer to allow game servers to access the data. For large-scale MMOs requiring world partitioning for thousands of players, custom solutions on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, or Amazon EKS are typically a better solution than Amazon GameLift Servers. For guidance on persistent world game hosting on AWS, please visit the AWS Solution Library for games here.

The Amazon GameLift Servers Toolkit includes a Fast build update tool which allows you to replace game server builds on active Amazon GameLift Servers Fleets. This reduces the iteration time on development Fleets to just a few minutes, allowing developers to test changes quickly and provide updated game server versions for QA testers and other internal teams.

The Amazon GameLift Servers Toolkit includes a Production deployment sample script that illustrates how you can update game server builds that are deployed on Amazon GameLift Servers managed EC2 fleets currently hosting live games. When game developers need to update their game server build without interrupting live sessions, they can modify and utilize the sample script to accomplish that task. The script deploys the new game server, then utilizes Aliases to transition player traffic to game servers running the updated build.

Yes. You can combine on-premises infrastructure with managed Amazon GameLift Servers fleets to host a global hybrid game server fleet by utilizing Amazon GameLift Servers Anywhere. Please see our Hybrid game server hosting with Amazon GameLift Servers Anywhere blog post and developer guide for more information.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a supported and maintained image provided by AWS for use on Amazon EC2. An AMI is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It also includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools. AWS provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon AMI.

First, integrate Amazon GameLift Servers into your game back-end and game server using the AWS SDK and the Amazon GameLift Servers SDK. Then, upload your game server to Amazon GameLift Servers in your AWS Account, and use the Amazon GameLift Servers console to set up fleets of computing resources and deploy your game. When your players connect, you can monitor your fleet through the Amazon GameLift Servers console. You can also integrate Amazon GameLift Servers with your custom game services like identity or matchmaking using the AWS SDK.

Amazon GameLift Servers provides documentation to help you prepare for the production launch of you game. Topics include preparing your game for use with Amazon GameLift Servers, load testing, requesting service quota increases. Please see our developer guide for more information.

Every customer has access to documentation, forums, the AWS Solutions Library and the Amazon GameLift Servers Toolkit. Additional support is available in AWS Premium Support packages.

A fleet is a set of compute resources that runs your game build and hosts game sessions. It can provide hosting to multiple locations globally. There are two types of fleets: Amazon GameLift Servers fleets and Amazon GameLift Servers Anywhere fleets. The Amazon GameLift Servers fleet represents hosting resources as a set of fully managed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) virtual computing machines, called instances. Amazon GameLift Servers Anywhere fleets represent hosting resources in the form of a set of customer managed servers. You can accommodate changes in player demand by increasing or decreasing the number of instances or customer managed hardware in your fleet. A fleet is configured to use a certain instance type, to deploy a build, and to run one or more server processes on each instance.

A multi-location fleet is a fleet with hosting resources in multiple geographic locations. Multi-location fleets have a home region and one or more remote locations. By utilizing multi-location fleets you can upload a game binary and deploy your hosting resources across multiple geographic locations. Remote locations can be any of the AWS Regions or Local Zones that Amazon GameLift Servers supports. Please visit the Amazon GameLift Servers developer guide for more information.

Fleet creation time is dependent on the size of your game build, your installation script runtime, and the number of locations you are deploying. This time is measured from the time you submit a fleet creation request to when it is fully deployed and accessible to your players. To learn more about fleet creation times, please visit the developer guide.

Please see the Amazon GameLift Servers Instance Pricing page for a full list of Amazon GameLift Servers instances.

The right instance type depends on your game’s server performance and the number of server processes you plan to run concurrently on each instance. The computational complexity of your game, optimization of your game and network code, and maximum number of players are the main drivers for the size of the instance that you will need. One of the advantages of Amazon GameLift Servers is that you only pay for what you use, which makes it convenient and inexpensive to test the performance of your game on different instance families and types.

Up to 50. The number of server processes depends on the performance requirements of your game servers and the instance type you choose for your fleet. When you set up a fleet, you will select an instance type and configure the fleet to concurrently run an optimum number of server processes. Running more processes on fewer instances can help you decrease costs. You can also configure your fleet to run multiple server builds or game configurations on each instance.

Amazon GameLift Servers provides a truly elastic computing environment. Amazon GameLift Servers instances enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can provision one, hundreds, or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.

Seamlessly provide the capacity you need to meet changes in player demand with Amazon GameLift Servers Target Tracking. Target Tracking is an autoscaling feature that allows you to simply set a percentage target for available game sessions, creating a buffer to accommodate fluctuations in player traffic. Amazon GameLift Servers will add or remove capacity as required to keep this buffer of available game sessions at the target value you define and adjust to a fluctuating load pattern, minimizing rapid fluctuations in capacity. For more information, see the Autoscaling section of the Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide.

Amazon GameLift Servers retains activity metrics. When you terminate an instance, any data generated by your game server and stored on the instance is lost. However, you can instruct Amazon GameLift Servers to retain and store these log files for up to seven days after the instance has been terminated.

Yes. You can remotely access an instance in a fleet that is in an activating, active, or error status. This is useful for debugging, inspecting player activity in real time, or connecting performance monitoring or benchmarking tools. You can modify your fleet’s port settings and protocols using either the AWS command line interface (CLI) or through the Amazon GameLift Servers console.

Yes, Amazon GameLift Servers makes updating production fleets simple with its alias feature. An alias enables you to direct traffic to fleets without having to change the client end-point descriptor. After creating a new production fleet, you can edit an alias to point from an older fleet to this newer fleet, routing all connecting players to the new fleet alias feature. Learn more about creating aliases in our Amazon GameLift Servers Developer Guide.

To see a list of regions that Amazon GameLift Servers is currently available in please visit the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation.

AWS Local Zones allow you to use Amazon GameLift Servers closer to more end-users, providing them very low latency access to the dedicated game servers running your session-based multiplayer games. AWS Local Zones are a new type of AWS infrastructure designed to run gaming-related workloads that require single-digit millisecond latency, like remote real-time gaming and augmented and virtual reality. Not every customer wants to operate their own on-premises data center, while others may be interested in getting rid of their local data center entirely. Local Zones allow customers to gain all the benefits of having compute resources closer to end-users, without the need to own and operate their own data center infrastructure.

To see a list of Local Zones that Amazon GameLift Servers is currently available in please visit the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation.

We support the following instance types in Local Zones for Amazon GameLift Servers: C5d 2xlarge and R5d 2xlarge.

Amazon GameLift Servers Spot instances offer access to spare AWS computing capacity at savings of between 50% and 85% compared to On-Demand prices. However, Spot instances can be interrupted by AWS with two minutes of notification when AWS needs the capacity back. You can use this notification period to migrate or shut down games running on those instances. Using the Amazon GameLift Servers built in game session placement algorithm, you can optimize for cost savings while maintaining high game server availability. The algorithm places new sessions on game servers based on player latencies, instance prices, and Spot interruption rates. You can customize how the algorithm balances these priorities.

You get the same high-performance hardware as Amazon GameLift Servers On-Demand instances, but save between 50% and 85%. By accepting a small decrease in server availability as compared to using only On-Demand instances, you can save a lot of money. For more information on Spot pricing and to see pricing examples please see the Amazon GameLift Servers Service pricing page.

You can find the best practices for using Spot instances in our developer guide You can also find a tutorial on how to best set up a game session queue for Spot Instances in our developer guide.

When AWS occasionally needs more capacity, some Amazon GameLift Servers Spot instances could receive a warning that the game servers must shut down within two minutes. When that happens, you can use the warning period to gracefully migrate or shut down active game sessions. To maintain an equal amount of available capacity for your game, the game session placement algorithm will automatically start new servers in the same region by using alternate Spot instances types or by using On-Demand instances.

No. The Amazon GameLift Servers game session placement algorithm minimizes the chances of termination.

The Amazon GameLift Servers game session placement algorithm tracks Spot interruption rates and uses this data to automatically place games on instances with low interruption frequencies.

While a Spot instance remains running, you will be charged the price set at the beginning of each hour.

The AWS Management Console makes a detailed billing report available which shows Spot instance start and termination/stop times for all instances.

Amazon GameLift Servers Spot prices fluctuate based on the current supply and demand for each instance type in each region. Spot instance prices are set by Amazon and adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply and demand for Spot instance capacity. However, Amazon GameLift Servers Spot prices never exceed Amazon GameLift Servers On-Demand prices. In the Amazon GameLift Servers console, you can view three months of historical pricing and savings data for Amazon GameLift Servers Spot for every instance type and region.

FlexMatch is available to anyone using Amazon GameLift Servers' managed game servers. FlexMatch can also be used as a standalone feature and is available to anyone, regardless of whether they host their games peer-to-peer, on-premises, or on cloud compute primitives. Please see our documentation for more information on FlexMatch.

To see a list of regions that FlexMatch is currently available in please visit the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation.

To see a list of regions that you can place a FlexMatch matchmaker in please visit the Amazon GameLift Servers documentation.

No. Once you create a FlexMatch rule set, that rule set can’t be changed. To change a rule set, you must clone the rule set, give it a new name, and then create your changes. To change the rule set for a live matchmaker, you then update the matchmaker’s configuration to use the new rule set instead of the old one. Because a rules set may be used by one or more live matchmakers, this limitation guards against causing unintended consequences to live production systems.

Yes. If you would like to use your own matchmaking system, you can feed match results into any game session queues that you define.

Using FlexMatch in standalone mode will incur charges based on player packages and matchmaking hours consumed. See the Amazon GameLift Servers FlexMatch pricing page for more details. Successful matches with FlexMatch automatically result in the creation of new game sessions. Depending on how you’re managing game server capacity, creating new game sessions may trigger additional server instances, for which you’ll be charged standard Amazon GameLift Servers instance prices.

Amazon GameLift Servers provides UDP (User Datagram Protocol) ping beacons that allow you to measure real-time network latency between game clients and game servers. These beacons are deployed in every AWS Region and Local Zone where Amazon GameLift Servers is available. By sending UDP packets to these beacons and measuring the round-trip time, you can accurately determine the network latency your players will experience when connecting to game servers in different locations. For more information on UDP ping beacons, including guidance on how to implement latency measurements and best practices for caching beacon endpoints, refer to UDP ping beacons in the Amazon GameLift Servers Hosting Guide.

Most multiplayer games use UDP (User Datagram Protocol) for real-time game traffic due to its lower overhead compared to TCP. While ICMP ping can provide a general indication of network connectivity, UDP ping beacons measure the actual latency your game traffic will experience. This gives you more accurate data for making decisions about game server placement and player matching.

You can use Amazon GameLift Servers UDP ping beacons to measure actual network latency from your players' locations to different AWS Regions and Local Zones. By collecting this latency data, you can identify which locations provide the lowest latency for your players, and then you can configure Amazon GameLift Servers to place game sessions in these optimal locations. The beacon endpoints are available through the Amazon GameLift Servers ListLocations API, making it easy to programmatically test latency to all available locations. For more information on UDP ping beacons, including guidance on how to implement latency measurements and best practices for caching beacon endpoints, refer to UDP ping beacons in the Amazon GameLift Servers Hosting Guide.

Yes. UDP ping beacons have a rate limit of 3 transactions per second (pings) per source IP address per port, and support UDP packets up to 300 bytes in size. These limits help ensure fair usage of the service while still providing accurate latency measurements for all customers. For more information, including guidance on how to implement latency measurements and best practices for caching beacon endpoints, refer to UDP ping beacons in the Amazon GameLift Servers Hosting Guide. 

No, UDP ping beacons are included at no additional cost as part of Amazon GameLift Servers. You can use them to measure latency from any number of client locations to any AWS Region or Local Zone supported by Amazon GameLift Servers.

UDP ping beacons allow you to incorporate real-time latency data into your matchmaking logic. By measuring actual UDP latency between players and potential game server locations, you can create matches that group players with acceptable latency to the same server. This helps ensure a consistent and fair experience for all players in a match.

UDP ping beacons provide reliable measurements of actual UDP packet latency between clients and Amazon GameLift Servers hosting locations. However, network conditions can vary over time, so we recommend taking multiple measurements and using averaging or other statistical methods to account for variance. The beacons' rate limit of 3 transactions per second provides sufficient sampling for accurate latency estimation while preventing abuse.

Amazon GameLift Servers includes 50GB EBS General Purpose (SSD) Volume for each instance. However, this limit is adjustable. For more information please see the Service Quotas page.

The build catalog is a record of all of your server builds that have been uploaded to Amazon GameLift Servers. Builds in ready state are available for fleet creation at any time.

The build catalog can store the maximum of 1,000 builds or 100GB of storage.

Yes, by default, you are limited to 10 fleets per region. However, this limit is adjustable. For more information please see the Amazon GameLift Servers Service Quotas page.

No, you are only limited by your AWS account limits.

Yes, Amazon GameLift Servers is limited by the number of instances available to your AWS account. If you need to raise this limit, you can do so via the service limits page in the Amazon GameLift Servers console.

If you are using Amazon GameLift Servers to manage your game sessions or use FlexMatch to create new game sessions after matching players then the maximum number of players per game session is 200. If you do not use Amazon GameLift Servers to manage your game sessions then your player count is only limited by hardware and networking constraints that are being utilized.

No, the maximum number of players per instance is primarily dictated by your game design and game code.

No.

You pay for the compute resources and bandwidth your games actually use, without monthly or annual contracts. Please see the Amazon GameLift Servers pricing page for more information.

FlexMatch in standalone mode will cost $20 per million player packages, and $1 per matchmaking hour. FlexMatch counts a Player Package each time you submit a player’s request to play a game session. This package also includes player attributes used to evaluate a match. Matchmaking Hours is calculated as the duration FlexMatch is executing a matchmaking evaluation, rounded up to the nearest 1 microsecond.

See the FlexMatch pricing page for details.

You pay for each game session placed and per server process connection minute. A game session is placed when you make a successful API request to host a game session on hardware that can run the game server software build. A server process connection minute is defined as one connection minute by a single compute process on a GLA-registered game server.

See the Anywhere pricing page for more details.

No. Please note that your Realtime servers are run within the context of game sessions. Depending on how you’re managing game server capacity, creating new game sessions may trigger additional server instances, for which you’ll be charged standard Amazon GameLift Servers instance prices.

No, we do not bill based on how you upload your game build. You pay for the compute resources and bandwidth your games actually use, without monthly or annual contracts.

Billing begins when you allocate Amazon GameLift Servers capacity and Amazon GameLift Servers launches your game’s server binary for the first time on each instance. Billing concludes when you stop instances. Both Windows and Linux instances are billed at per instance-second and have a 1 minute minimum charge per-instance.

Our SLA guarantees a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.5% for Amazon GameLift Servers within a Region.

You are eligible for a SLA credit for Amazon GameLift Servers if the region that you are operating in has an Monthly Uptime Percentage of less than 99.5% during any monthly billing cycle. For full details on all of the terms and conditions of the SLA, as well as details on how to submit a claim, please see https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/sla/.

No. Only your authorized users with the necessary AWS credentials can access the Amazon GameLift Servers console. You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to securely share AWS credentials across a team. Please see Creating IAM Policies for Amazon GameLift Servers for more details.

Yes. To receive a history of Amazon GameLift Servers API calls made on your account, you simply turn on CloudTrail in the AWS Management Console.

For more information about securing AWS resources, see the AWS Security Center.

Security is a shared responsibility between AWS and you. The shared responsibility model describes this as security of the cloud and security in the cloud. You can read more about how this applies to the Amazon GameLift service in our developer guide here.

Sign up for an AWS account for instant access to the AWS Free Tier, which will give you the following benefits: 

• 125 hours per month of Amazon GameLift Servers c3.large, c4.large and c5.large (combined) depending on region for On-Demand instance usage, plus 50 GB EBS General Purpose SSD storage
   
• 15 GB per month of bandwidth out, aggregated across all AWS services

Try Amazon GameLift Servers for free here