Nakama and Amazon GameLift: Elevating Session-Based Multiplayer to New Heights

San Francisco – March 18, 2024 – We’re happy to announce that the long-standing partnership between Heroic Labs and Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to expand, bringing new and exciting opportunities for game developers, studios, and publishers across the globe. The newly available integration between Heroic Labs’ industry leading game server, Nakama, and the dedicated game server management service from AWS, Amazon GameLift, aims to elevate and improve the quality of multiplayer gameplay no matter the size, scale, and complexity of the game design or the locations and demands of the player base.

This direct integration fuses the strengths of both services to create a seamless, powerful platform for game developers and an unparalleled experience for players. By integrating with Amazon GameLift, Nakama now enables easy implementation of multiplayer gameplay no matter the format required: server-relayed, server-authoritative, or session-based.

In server-relayed multiplayer, Nakama stores the match ID and list of players but otherwise has no insight or oversight in the game data being shared by the clients. That insight and oversight is the distinguishing difference for server-authoritative gameplay, where your custom server code describes the gameplay rules (e.g. how many players per match, whether in-progress matches remain open) to be enforced by the server along with the actual gameplay data (e.g. player movements, environment changes). Session-based multiplayer is an extension of the server-authoritative model where a dedicated server is required and responsible for each multiplayer match. This is typically needed only where the game has complex physics and/or intensive graphics (i.e. a high-fidelity racing game) requirements.

Enabling More Social Gameplay Opportunities

Nakama has always provided a complete feature set for rich social and real-time multiplayer games - Friends, Groups, Real-time Parties, Chat, Leaderboards, Tournaments, and importantly, a robust Matchmaker to bring players together.

When bringing these features together into a massively multiplayer player experience, with large open worlds, huge groups of globally distributed players, or with physics intensive demands, you then need a dedicated server for each multiplayer match to handle the gameplay physics and state. The Nakama-GameLift Plugin now enables developers to query and manage their GameLift fleets with the same ease and convenience that Nakama’s powerful, intuitively designed APIs have brought to its existing feature set.

By integrating Nakama - where players have their accounts, friends, groups, and more - with Amazon GameLift’s session management you can ensure players are not only matched with suitable opponents but are also quickly connected to the best available game server to reduce wait times and improve overall gaming satisfaction.

The combination allows for seamless handling of real-time multiplayer sessions, with Nakama serving as a central orchestrator of matches and match data and a hub for all player data across your entire fleet of servers. You can now update a player’s stats in Nakama while they are active in an ongoing session, process in-app purchases or access player wallet info and inventory, or any other of the rich set of features enabled by Nakama.

This plugin with Nakama and Amazon GameLift - available as open-source and complete with a sample project to get you started quickly - provides complete support for developers to programmatically interact with the full range of functionality and centralized user data on both Nakama and Amazon GameLift, allowing you to manage the Amazon GameLift provisioning system, and search for existing Amazon GameLift instances or create new ones (and delete instances no longer needed) as required.

The plugin with Nakama and Amazon GameLift enables developers to support the full range of available platforms and reach the largest possible number of players, whether they are playing on PC, console, or mobile devices. This cross-platform support is crucial for building larger, more engaged gaming communities, breaking down barriers between different types of gamers.

A Limitless Future

The integration of Nakama and Amazon GameLift will enhance current gaming experiences and pave the way for future innovations. In the same way that Nakama has enabled developers - whether indie, startup, or AAA studios - to build rich, social gameplay, this integration will inspire new ways to create immersive, engaging, and accessible gaming experiences at massive scale - easily enabled by Heroic Cloud, the hosted service for deploying and managing Nakama at scale - for players around the world.