Before this change hosting a game with an average CCU of 100,000, with each client sending 1 Mbps would cost $1,650,791 per month in AWS data transfer egress fees at list price.
Obviously, nobody actually spent that. At scale people would negotiate better deals.
The reason why this is a big deal is that now small games, or studios who launch their first game and don't have any real clout yet can get a really good deal from AWS by default.
I think this will result in most new games electing to host in AWS Gamelift by default, due to the difficulty of procuring enough bare metal at launch on favorable terms
For example, working out how much bare metal and in which locations to order? It's really difficult to work out when you are launching a game and you don't know how successful the game will be.
Now studios can just scale elastically up/down at launch, find out their base load and maybe bare metal can beat it, or maybe not, but AWS is competitive now with bare metal for games, and easier to spin up and adjust your fleet, vs. old-school purchase by the month and 30 days notice to shut down bare metal :)
Obviously, nobody actually spent that. At scale people would negotiate better deals.
The reason why this is a big deal is that now small games, or studios who launch their first game and don't have any real clout yet can get a really good deal from AWS by default.
I think this will result in most new games electing to host in AWS Gamelift by default, due to the difficulty of procuring enough bare metal at launch on favorable terms
For example, working out how much bare metal and in which locations to order? It's really difficult to work out when you are launching a game and you don't know how successful the game will be.
Now studios can just scale elastically up/down at launch, find out their base load and maybe bare metal can beat it, or maybe not, but AWS is competitive now with bare metal for games, and easier to spin up and adjust your fleet, vs. old-school purchase by the month and 30 days notice to shut down bare metal :)