Cloud Gaming with Amazon GameLift Streams: Play Games Without Client Installation

Amazon GameLift Streams is a fully managed cloud game streaming service that renders games on AWS cloud GPUs and transmits video to user devices. By uploading a game build and completing a few configurations, users can run games in a browser without downloads or client installations.

Large downloads, long installation times, and high-spec hardware requirements increase the time to first play, leading to new user churn. GameLift Streams focuses on lowering these barriers by connecting users from ads or recommendations directly to the game.

Building cloud game streaming directly requires implementing GPU infrastructure, low-latency media pipelines, WebRTC signaling, global deployment, auto-scaling, and session lifecycle management. GameLift Streams provides these as a managed service and leverages the AWS backbone network to reduce latency.

WebRTC is used for streaming communication. The screen rendered on the server is delivered to the client as a video stream, and keyboard, mouse, touch, and gamepad inputs are sent to the server via DataChannel.

The service architecture consists of the following three core resources:

• Application: Defines the game build stored in S3, the runtime environment, and the executable path.
• Stream Group: A pool of computing resources specifying stream classes and capacity, which can connect multiple applications.
• Stream Session: An individual game stream executed on computing resources from a stream group and delivered to end users.

The runtime is selected from Windows Server 2022, Proton, Ubuntu 22.04. Windows supports DirectX 11·12 and anti-cheat but allows only one session per instance, while Proton offers multi-tenancy and cost efficiency through a Linux-based compatibility layer. Stream classes, capacity, and deployment locations must be designed together based on the game's OS compatibility, GPU requirements, anti-cheat needs, and expected concurrent user count.