Amazon’s GameLift service now features streaming capabilities that allow developers and publishers to “build and deliver global, direct-to-player game streaming experiences.”
The streams will enable them to release games directly onto any device with a web browser, including PCs, mobile phones, and SmartTVs. As Amazon notes, this means companies “[avoid] investing millions of dollars in infrastructure and software development to build your own service. Players can start gaming in just a few seconds, without waiting for downloads or installs.”
Party game developer Jackbox is GameLift Streams’ first proponent, and CTO Evan Jacover lauded how the technology easily integrated with its games. “Based on our experiences talking with other streaming platforms, we were anticipating having to do a custom build, but we didn’t need to,” he said. “We just took our Windows build, uploaded it to Amazon GameLift Streams, and it ran. The whole process was efficient, and the game looked and sounded great.”
Jackbox’s game library has grown enough to require a unified launcher, and Jacover noted that scaling for each individual title would require “a lot of overhead.” Gamelift Streams let the developer scale “for our whole catalog, which makes everything much more efficient. Keeping costs down is the key to making streaming work from a business standpoint, so these efficiencies really add up.”
To further prove GameLift Streams’ capabilities, Jackbox launched a SmartTV app. Longtime players can access their library from the app in a “more elegant and streamlined way,” and newcomers without a console have an easier way to explore the developer’s work.
According to Amazon’s blog, the GameLift Streams SDK integrates with a game’s already existing services, storefronts, and launchers to enable streaming. Developers can use the SDK console to observe active streams and scale the infrastructure across multiple regions on the Amazon Web Services network. “GameLift Streams is the only solution that enables you to upload your game content onto fully-managed GPU instances in the cloud and start streaming in minutes,” it reads, “with little or no modification of your code.”
