Heroic Labs announces support for Nakama for AWS for Games

Our AWS Marketplace offering has been updated since this post. Read about it here.

San Francisco – March 23, 2022 – Heroic Labs, makers of the open source multiplayer game server backend solution Nakama, announced support for the AWS for Games initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) by bringing Nakama to AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.

Nakama is a production-ready, scalable game server solution for real-time, multiplayer, and social projects of all sizes. Nakama powers AAA console, PC, and free-to-play (F2P) games from studios including Zynga, Paradox, Snap, and many others. Studios running Nakama have reached peaks of 15M MAU, 3M DAU, and 350,000 CCU in production games using the platform.

AWS for Games is an initiative featuring services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for Games customers. The initiative makes it easier for game developers, publishers, and platforms to select the right tools and partners to build, run, and grow their games. For customers looking to accelerate deployments with solution-specific support, AWS for Games also identifies dedicated AWS Game Tech industry specialists, AWS Services, and leading AWS Partners in each solution area.

With recent market shifts, game developers need solutions to create ever more engaging content in order to successfully monetize their customers. Nakama allows developers to deploy battle-tested backend multiplayer server and social capabilities on demand, and be able to leverage AWS as their games scale on the cloud to greater levels of success. Andre Vrignaud, VP of Strategic Partnerships for Heroic Labs

We’re excited to work with Heroic Labs to further empower game developers to build amazing, successful, and fun games. As more games offer live services and connected experiences in their games, developers need a diverse set of solutions to use. Working with Heroic Labs on AWS for Games gives developers more solutions to use so teams can focus more on creating fun player experiences. Lucien Parsons, Global Partner Leader for Games at AWS Game Tech

Nakama has been identified as a solution for customers migrating from Amazon’s GameSparks, and has been able to make that transition efficiently for multiple customers including Italy’s Whatwapp Entertainment. Whatwapp was able to evaluate Nakama in AWS Marketplace and then chose to implement Nakama in their own virtual private cloud (VPC) running on AWS. By doing so, Whatwapp was able to leverage their own internal analytics and safely connect their game servers to their internal business intelligence platforms while allowing Heroic Labs to manage Whatwapp’s AWS on their behalf.

With Nakama’s technology, game studios can create a Kubernetes cluster with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), use Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL-compatible features, and utilize Amazon CloudWatch logging and monitoring functions to monitor and deploy multiple game projects across availability zones as a highly scalable and performant game server stack. This deployment leverages the elasticity of the AWS compute layer to achieve cost effective scale for games of all types and which target different devices and software platforms.

Our games count millions of active users daily, so when we had to pick our new partner, we wanted a proven system that could scale with ease, and that provided all the necessary building blocks to create complex backend features. Nakama seemed a good solution that provided a scalable system with enough out-of-the-box features to speed up our development time. The fact that we could run it on our private cloud and leverage the scalability of AWS, where we have all our internal systems and platform tools, made it an obvious choice. Alessandro Lacroce, Co-Founder at Whatwapp

CATAN Universe offers a wide set of features to our customers, and we invested significant time in researching options when we moved from GameSparks. We are happy to have found a solution with Nakama and the Heroic Cloud that allows us to continue to deliver the features our customers enjoy, as well as expand in the future. Our Catanians need to be able to connect to friends and chat together, create guilds, play in tournaments and enjoy custom game modes. All of this needs a robust set of capabilities to power underlying systems as well as massive scalability. We are excited to move to Nakama and into the Heroic Cloud to offer the greatest flexibility to our creative and development teams with the support of the great engineers over at Heroic Labs. Gregor Giehrl, Principal Product Owner Games at United Soft Media (USM), publisher of CATAN Universe

Nakama is available in AWS Marketplace, where customers can install Nakama on AWS with a single click. From there, developers can develop and test against the platform, as well as migrate any custom code to Heroic Cloud or Private Cloud without any changes should they need the greater scalability and support of Nakama Enterprise in the future. Those companies who might need greater scalability and support options are encouraged to contact us to explore the capabilities of Nakama Enterprise.

About Heroic Labs

Heroic Labs builds Nakama, an open-source distributed social and real-time server for games and apps. It includes social services for users, data storage, and real-time client/server communication as well as specialized APIs for real-time multiplayer, groups/guilds, and chat. Heroic Labs is a Y Combinator company.