🎮 Supercharging the Gaming Experience with AWS: A Journey with Riot Games
Riot Games, the company behind the popular game "League of Legends," has been on a journey to improve the gaming experience for its millions of players worldwide. With the help of AWS, Riot Games has been able to supercharge its purpose and make it better to be a player. In this article, we'll take a look at Riot Games' journey with AWS and how they were able to overcome challenges and achieve success.
🌎 Going All-In on Cloud
Riot Games was a single game company with all its eggs in one basket, "League of Legends." Back in 2009 when "League" launched, it was completely reliant on colo data centers, which they managed because they didn't trust that anyone else could meet their bar for making live games great. But by 2017, it was taking forever to get things done. Riot Games knew that if over a hundred million players worldwide didn't see them investing in and loving their own game, they would leave, even if it is free to play. So they started looking at options and quickly settled on going all-in on Cloud. That meant they would migrate to AWS, which had the broad set of services they needed to run Riot.
🎮 Launching "Valorant" with AWS
"Valorant," a tactical shooter game, had very specific design goals and one in particular presented a unique challenge which they were able to address thanks to AWS's Global Cloud infrastructure, Peeker's advantage. Peeker's advantage occurs when a player in motion can push the corner, knowing there is a split second delay for the defender on the other side, which allows the peeker to see the defender first. And one way to address this in first-person shooter games is by adding more places for the defenders to hide. But that increases the luck and the chance of the game versus it being on the player's skill alone, and to Riot Games, that just feels bad. So they made it a priority to mitigate this in "Valorant," and they determined that at highly competitive levels of the game, if server tick rate is at least 128 per second, which requires a ton of compute, and network latency was under 35 milliseconds to players requiring all those AWS locations. If those two things happen, peeker's have no advantage. And by using AWS, Riot Games was able to launch "Valorant" globally with fairly low risk.
📺 Modernizing Remote Broadcasting
While games were doing great, eSports had no new content for them. Riot Games had a new problem, how could they reinvent remote broadcast and eliminate the need for onsite staff sitting in cramped trucks? Of course, AWS had a solution for that. They ended up enabling video encoding and production to happen in the Cloud, with their folks accessing it through AWS workspaces from home. It was pretty wild, from their proposal to rollout, it ended up taking all of 11 days. And today they've matured even further, they leveraged AWS to remotely produce events all over the world, all from their remote broadcasting centers in Dublin, Ireland, and Seattle, Washington. This allows producers, editors, and casters to be in one place while all their events are another.
🌩️ Migrating to the Cloud
It was time to modernize "League" and migrate into the Cloud. But there were some challenges. Like first, they had to figure out how to safely deploy, configure, and test 30 plus microservices in a world where every service team was used to managing their services independently and how they wanted. And second, using Amazon EKS out of the box just didn't meet their needs because some of their games can run on average 35 minutes and they couldn't just pause or take a container out of service within 15 minutes if required for AWS maintenance. So they made a product ask and AWS delivered a short-term solve and then followed through with a long-term solution for them. But they also know there'd be some additional expected benefits along the way and one was uptime. In the old days when a thing in a Riot data center failed in an unexpected way, it was often a large outage that lasted one to three hours. But once they got up and running at AWS, those outages instead turned to hiccups that players barely notice. And the other one was visibility. Anyone here ever spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out what you have, how it's configured, and who consumed what for who? So did they. But with AWS retrieving this data is pretty much now all an API call away.
🚀 Conclusion
Riot Games' journey with AWS has been a successful one. They migrated 14 data centers, modernized a decade-old game for hundreds of millions of very loyal players around the world, basically rebuilt the plane in flight, modernized remote broadcasting, and launched several global games in Cloud over 36 months. They didn't actually do anything groundbreaking here. When there were problems, they looked for solutions, and it just so happened that AWS had them for them. And so a quick tip, make the ask. It doesn't matter what size company you are, if it makes sense for the broader customer base, AWS just might do it. Or like them, there might be a short-term solve. And one final takeaway, when you're looking at Cloud and whether it serves your needs, don't assume what was true six months ago is true now. Cloud moves very fast and it's always changing.
🎉 Highlights
- Riot Games migrated to AWS to supercharge their purpose and make it better to be a player.
- AWS helped Riot Games launch "Valorant" globally with fairly low risk.
- AWS enabled Riot Games to reinvent remote broadcast and eliminate the need for onsite staff sitting in cramped trucks.
- Riot Games modernized a decade-old game for hundreds of millions of very loyal players around the world.
- When there were problems, Riot Games looked for solutions, and AWS had them for them.
❓ FAQ
Q: What is "Peeker's advantage" in first-person shooter games?
A: Peeker's advantage occurs when a player in motion can push the corner, knowing there is a split second delay for the defender on the other side, which allows the peeker to see the defender first.
Q: How did AWS help Riot Games modernize "League" and migrate into the Cloud?
A: AWS delivered a short-term solve and then followed through with a long-term solution for Riot Games. They also provided benefits such as uptime and visibility.
Q: What is the tip Riot Games gives for working with AWS?
A: Make the ask. It doesn't matter what size company you are, if it makes sense for the broader customer base, AWS just might do it. Or like them, there might be a short-term solve.
Resources:
- [Voc.ai AI Chatbot](https://www.voc.ai/product/ai-chatbot)
