Building a Hit Mobile Game Quickly Using Amazon GameLift Servers with Netflix

Netflix delivers TV series, documentaries, feature films, and mobile games across a wide variety of genres and languages. The company supports over 260 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries. Netflix Games, an integrated part of the Netflix platform, offers a subscription for unlimited access to more than 80 mobile games that contain no ads, extra fees, or in-app purchases.

With such high international interest in Netflix’s hit series Squid Game, the company saw the potential to create a companion mobile game. As this was Netflix’s first multiplayer game, it sought a solution that could help the company develop and launch the game to a global market with an accelerated release. Within weeks, the development team had connected to the Amazon GameLift Servers to begin testing the game. Next, the game was available to Netflix employees for internal testing.

During development, the Amazon GameLift Servers team from AWS supported the Netflix team by offering sample code, providing advice on project structure best practices, helping to identify potential issues, and pointing out opportunities for improvement. “The Amazon GameLift Servers team gave us a good overview of how to take advantage of the service from the start,” says Richard Musser, platform director at Netflix. “Throughout the development process, we bounced ideas off them and got confirmation that we were heading down the right path. They were hands-on, proactive developers.” Netflix launched the game 2 months early with a limited beta test before making it available for free to all players, whether they had a Netflix subscription or not, 1 week before season two of Squid Game premiered.

Amazon GameLift Servers rapidly increased the game’s speed to market—without the service, Netflix would have needed an additional, dedicated engineering team to build the necessary infrastructure. “The main selling point for AWS is that it handles the common technology that every piece of software needs,” says Musser. “By using a solution that is tuned for games, we can focus on what’s unique to our game and spend less time on non-differentiating backend services. We can launch bigger games with a smaller team using Amazon GameLift Servers.”

Netflix also used Amazon GameLift Servers FlexMatch (FlexMatch), a customizable matchmaking service for multiplayer games, to handle player-matching rules. Using these rules as a base, Netflix could match players around the world with compatible skill levels, leading to a more satisfactory user experience. “We saved an enormous amount of effort because we didn’t have to develop all the systems ourselves,” says Musser. “We could focus on testing the rules and experience rather than building significant custom services to do matchmaking.” As the scale of players increases, Netflix can rapidly iterate and adjust rules using the built-in flexibility of FlexMatch.

Games need to be reliable at launch to retain players, so Netflix invested a significant amount of time in load testing prior to the release. “Because of the visibility of the Squid Game title and the reach that Netflix has, it was important to have a robust game from launch that people could use and have a good experience with—without launch day issues,” says Musser. Load testing at scale helped the company to spot potential issues, and the Amazon GameLift servers team helped Netflix increase capacity when necessary, which helped to increase the company’s confidence to launch on time. The launch was successful with global coverage from day one and a positive player experience. In the first 2 weeks, Squid Game: Unleashed became the number one free action game in 57 countries.

The game has continued to draw a dedicated fan base across the globe. Using Amazon GameLift Servers, Netflix achieves low latency by adding and removing regions as needed. The development team also continually focuses on observability and data analysis to quickly identify and resolve problems for a positive player experience. Amazon GameLift Servers provide the visibility for Netflix to proactively resolve issues at a much faster rate.

Netflix plans to release new features and content for Squid Game: Unleashed, coinciding with the season three release of Squid Game, the series. Netflix is also considering building additional games on Amazon GameLift Servers and using a similar strategy to support Netflix Games’s user experience without being a Netflix member. “You don’t have a second chance to launch a game, so you have to come out of the gate with something that people want to play, or they just won’t play it,” says Musser. “Amazon GameLift Servers take a lot of the risk and uncertainty out of development projects, so you can launch a big title with less effort. It takes a lot of the really challenging problems out of the equation.”