When gamers think of Quake, they think of insane speed, unbelievable skill, and plenty of juicy, satisfying gibs. But for Quake Champions to deliver the blistering competition you expect, it’s critical for us to provide servers that deliver always-on, lightning-fast performance whenever our players demand it.
Let’s face it – no one wants to sit in queues waiting for a space to open up because there aren’t enough servers online. That’s why we’ve partnered with Amazon Web Services to leverage Amazon GameLift, their flexible cloud-based game hosting infrastructure, to help us make sure Quake Champions delivers the intensity and speed our most dedicated players demand.
Quake Champions is the fastest, most intense multiplayer competition in the world, providing players with deadly battlegrounds to prove their skill in the ultimate test of FPS ability. Whether in Duel, Deathmatch, or the new team-based multiplayer mode, Sacrifice, Amazon GameLift’s servers help improve the Quake experience and allows us, as developers, to focus on what’s important – making the game better, adding awesome new content, and maximizing performance.
We know from two decades of experience that Quake fans are the most knowledgeable and experienced FPS gamers on earth, and they want to know they’re getting the best, most robust support.
So for those of you who need to know, read on to find out how Amazon GameLift makes Quake Champions better and faster.
What is Amazon GameLift?
Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling multiplayer game servers in the cloud.
That sounds like a lot of tech industry jargon, so what does that actually mean? In short, Amazon GameLift does the heavy lifting on servers for us, freeing us up to focus on the game while at the same time automatically adjusting on the fly to make sure there are always rock-solid servers available for you to jump into an arena.
What Amazon GameLift Means to id
Amazon GameLift has been great for us. We get the elasticity of the cloud and great tools for controlling the servers without having to spend a lot of engineering time creating all of these things on our own. We can focus on building great games and let Amazon GameLift handle all of the time-consuming elements of managing great servers.
We also don’t have to worry about server capacity. Amazon GameLift’s automatic server scaling fires up additional servers when more of you are online and turns them off when you’re not playing. Generally, our peak load time for players falls into 9-hour window. Without Amazon GameLift, we’d have about 15 hours every day where up to 60% of server capacity is sitting idle. By using Amazon GameLift, we can see a huge cost savings that can be reinvested into the game while at the same time feel confident that you will always have matches to get into.
Amazon GameLift also provides a rules system that allows us to finely tune how new servers are created or shutdown. We can pre-stage extra servers if we know a big patch or update is being released. And the Amazon CLI tools allow us to easily automate the deployment of builds and fleets, easily pre-staging new builds in all regions and attaining zero downtime for game server deployments.
So, as a Quake Player, Why Do You Care? How Does It Make Quake Champions Even Better?
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Provides the Best Online Experience: First and foremost, id Software is obsessed with delivering the world's best multiplayer experience for Quake Champions. Leveraging Amazon GameLift is one way we’re listening to you and constantly improving the game and your experience.
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Servers as Fast as Quake: Amazon GameLift helps make matchmaking fast, stability rock-solid, and latency imperceptible.
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Great Servers, Wherever You Are: Using AWS' global infrastructure, Amazon GameLift assures that you’re always quickly placed into matches and are playing on the fastest, most reliable servers no matter when or where you are playing.
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We Can Focus on the Game, Not the Servers: Amazon GameLift’s service means our team doesn’t spend our time managing our own servers -- we’re spending our time building and improving the game – based on your feedback – for you. We’re not buying or setting up hardware, managing ongoing activity, security, storage, or performance tracking.
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Better Security: AWS provides superior low-latency, high-performance networking and adds additional security from DDOS attacks. That means more server uptime and competitive-level performance for all of your gibbiest rail shots.
For more information on Amazon GameLift, check out the official site.