AWS for Games at Unreal Fest 2023

Unreal Fest, the annual developer conference organized by Epic Games, the company behind Unreal Engine (UE), returns to New Orleans October 3—5 for three days of speaking sessions, hands-on workshops, and specialized industry tracks. The conference brings together game developers, designers, artists, and professionals across industries to gain deeper insights into the latest technologies, learn from experts, and network with fellow Unreal Engine creators and game developers. This blog post highlights AWS for Games presence at Unreal Fest 2023 , including how to enter for the chance to win a Nintendo Switch at our booth on the expo hall floor. To learn more about how Unreal Engine game developers are scaling real-time 3D experiences using AWS, visit aws.amazon.com/games/partners/unreal.

Build on AWS at Unreal Fest 2023

Onsite Activities

AWS is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor at Unreal Fest this year, which includes a partner speaking session, booth giveaways, and live product demonstrations led by AWS industry experts.

• Visit our booth – do you want to see live demonstrations focused on how creators use UE and AWS to build and scale real-time 3D experiences? Do you want the chance to win a Nintendo Switch or Amazon Luna Controller? Stop by our booth in the expo hall for live demonstrations of Unreal Engine use cases powered by AWS. Learn more and schedule time to meet with an AWS industry expert
• Join our speaking session – discover the potential of cloud technology in film production as we explore the concept of a Virtual Art Department. Making a Movie in the Cloud: Empowering Collaborative Filmmaking presented by John MacInnes, a three-time MegaGrant winner who brought cinematic storytelling to Call of Duty, and Patrick Palmer, AWS Principal Solutions Architect in M&E, provide practical insights and real-world examples of creators expanding movie-making endeavors to new heights with UE and AWS. The hour-long session takes place on October 5 at 10:00AM in room 208 at the New Orleans Convention Center.

Customers building Unreal Engine games on AWS

Learn how game studios combine advanced 3D game development technology with purpose-built global infrastructure capabilities to build, run, and grow their games.

• Epic Games went all in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2018 to deliver the storage, analytics, and scaling capabilities critical to its business, which exploded with the release of Fortnite—an online game with around 15 million daily active users. Fortnite runs almost entirely on AWS, including its worldwide game-server fleet, backend services, and websites. Learn more.
• Odyssey Interactive is a Waterloo-based a game studio founded in 2020 seeking a cost-effective solution to launch and scale its first game, Omega Strikers. Strikers is an exciting three-on-three footbrawler built on Unreal Engine. With “battle-tested” AWS and UE solutions, Odyssey Interactive was able to focus on making a good game instead of its backend infrastructure. Watch the customer video.
• QXR Studios co-founder Graeme Devine noted, “It used to take 100+ person teams five years and $25M to deliver at this level. As an industry, tools like AWS and Unreal let us access artists and modelers around the world, in addition to the technology’s underlying services. This allows smaller game companies to produce AAA game content, and that’s exciting.” Read the customer blog.
• Red Barrels is an independent game studio based in Montreal that has been developing on Unreal Engine since the inception of the studio. The company needed a solution to manage game servers for its first multiplayer title, Outlast Trials. Red Barrels chose to use both UE and AWS due to the power and flexibility both technologies bring to the game development process. Watch the customer video.
• Behaviour Interactive is one of the largest game studios in Canada and has grown Dead by Daylight, its award-winning asymmetrical multiplayer horror game, to over 50 million players since it first launched in 2016. With Unreal Engine and AWS, the studio is able to create high-fidelity game experiences that it can confidently scale to millions of players.

Behaviour Interactive has grown Dead by Daylight to over 50 million players worldwide

Unreal Engine use cases powered by AWS

AWS for Games provides a portfolio of purpose-built capabilities to help UE game developers reduce costs, iterate faster, and deliver a better player experience at a global scale.

• Virtual Workstation – Epic Unreal Engine 5 Workstations on AWS seamlessly deliver high-fidelity, immersive 3D experiences across the globe without the need for expensive hardware and physical workstations to host and render the 3D data. This Amazon Machine Image (AMI) comes pre-loaded with UE 5.2 and all its prerequisites so you can get straight to creating in the cloud with no downloads or installs. Learn more.
• Build Pipelines – Incredibuild on AWS delivers a powerful solution that gives Unreal Engine developers and DevOps managers a scalable platform to continuously build, improve, and release your game on time. Learn more.
• Version Control – Perforce Helix Core on AWS is an enterprise version control system that offers global scale and superior performance by providing a single source of truth for Unreal Engine digital assets that scales to manage global teams and large binary assets. Learn more.
• Game QA and Testing – Amazon GameLift Anywhere integrates hardware from your environment to accelerate game play monitoring and debugging in real-time on a local workstation. Learn more.
• Game Server Hosting – Amazon GameLift’s dedicated game server management service powered by AWS Graviton3 processors enables the best price performance for compute-intensive Unreal Engine gaming workloads. Amazon GameLift Plugin for Unreal Engine supports UE5, UE5.1, UE5.2, and UE5.3 for Windows and Mac OS and includes updated Amazon GameLift SDK 5+ APIs, which allows customers to build, test, and deploy their games in the Unreal Engine Editor. Learn more.
• Game Analytics – Game Analytics Pipeline on AWS helps game developers launch a scalable serverless data pipeline to ingest, store, and analyze player data generated by active users of Unreal Engine game client and builds. Learn more.
• Custom Game Backend Hosting – Guidance for custom game backend hosting on AWS demonstrates how to deploy a custom, lightweight, and scalable cross-platform game identity component, along with sample code for Unreal Engine 5. Learn more.

Seven purpose-built capabilities to help game developers build, run, and grow their UE games on AWS

Conclusion 

Unreal Fest is the premiere event of the year for developers and creators across industries to come together, learn about new projects, get hands-on training on the latest technology, and meet and network with other creators. To learn more about how UE game developers are transforming game workloads and experiences with AWS, meet with one of our industry experts at our booth and visit the AWS and Unreal Engine homepage.