In late March, Amazon launched AWS for games – entering the competition with Google and Microsoft, with the hopes of becoming the main cloud computing platform for gaming developers.
With the growth of the overall gaming industry, as well as the development of how games are made, adapted, marketed, built, distributed, and played – the global gaming market has become overwhelmingly large, and by that – overwhelmingly interesting to big tech companies. Furthermore, with the cloud adoption, games are made quicker than ever, and are open to continuous updates – meaning that their player base can be more engaged than it was before and has a greater potential to grow in both numbers, and in capital.
What can AWS change in gaming?
To understand the changes that AWS could bring to various gaming sites, it’s necessary to clarify and simplify what AWS in itself is. So, in the simplest terms, AWS is a cloud computing platform that consists of various products and services such as computing, networking, databases, analytics, storage, management, developer tools and much more.
Following that, the simplest, quickest change that AWS could bring into the gaming world is the ability to produce games more quickly, and to have a continuous output of updates, fixes, and innovations into the game.
To paint the picture of what this means for the user, let’s look at the example of Póker, since most online casinos, and betting platforms are kept more regulated, and more frequently updated than gaming sites – and, with that, the options of utilizing AWS are clearer and easier to imagine.
The status quo of a website offering online poker services requires the domain to pay extra attention to their users – watch out for their engagement habits, keep up with ID checks, ensure they are of age, ensure they follow the pre-set rules and similar.
The introduction of AWS as the basic cloud platform for such a website would offer the ability to use various analytic methods as the main mechanism of engaging with users – meaning that the platform would need to put in less time and effort to get a better insight into how their users are utilizing the platform, what needs they might have, what they spend their time on etc.
Besides solely knowing what the users might want or need – the introduction of AWS would also open the possibility to fix these needs without the users even knowing. In other words, AWS offers the developers (or the platform) the option to fix a portion of the code and immediately introduce the fix to their users, without requiring any sort of an update, or other type of gameplay interventions.
The tangible benefits of AWS
The first thing to clear up is that the user experience is unequivocally better in the platforms and games that use cloud computing than in those that do not. The main reason for this is that developing and adapting games is made easier – much like the entire process of knowing what your audience needs, and pandering to said needs.
However, we can still ask ourselves if AWS is the way to go – or if alternatives like Microsoft Azure should be prioritized. Within this, it is difficult to assess how the markets will develop, and whether Azure or AWS will come up with a revolutionary new idea that will make them tremendously better than all other options.
In the current situation, AWS has a greater market share and greater revenue than its competitors, it has been reported as the “easier option”, primarily because it allows users to select their preferred programming language, database, and operating system – and, finally, it reportedly has the largest amount of products and services available to its users.
With that in mind, nobody can be 100% certain about what the outcome of using AWS in gaming sites might be, but at the moment it seems to be good – and it seems to be promising even greater things.
