Freedom Games supports the indie game community with AWS

More than entertainment, video games unite people across the globe with common interests. It’s that sense of community that drives Freedom Games to support indie developers in bringing their titles to players worldwide. Established in 2020, Freedom Games has built a platform that supports many indie studios every year, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) providing the core infrastructure. Additionally, the Freedom Games team runs wiki.gg, an online community for developers, editors, and gamers to exchange information on their favorite games, which is also powered by AWS.

“Sometimes indie developers associate using AWS for large-scale gaming experiences, but what they don’t realize is that it’s also great for smaller scale needs, which is why we’ve come to depend on it,” noted Freedom Games CEO Donovan Duncan.

“AWS is easy to work with and spin up at scale,” added Freedom Games Senior Director of Technology Evan Bryant. “We also have wonderful customer reps, who provide good insights into best practices for leveraging our toolsets and have vast experience in the space.”

Serving developers and fans

Freedom Games provides developers with AWS-based tools for cross-platform game development, including multiplayer hosting with Amazon GameLift. This allows game developers to launch games that are more broadly accessible and can be played across platforms for wider audience reach. Additionally, games can run on regionalized instances for improved multiplayer latency and to enhance the overall experience.

“AWS helps our developers get to market faster and makes the journey easier,” said Duncan. “Indie developers typically work on shorter timelines and want to get online quickly. We can move faster with AWS, given how many resources are available than if we had to do it ourselves. It’s great having a scalable partner.”

AWS is also vital to the wiki.gg website and makes it easy for the team to scale and grow its infrastructure footprint to maintain a high-quality user experience, which runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). A community-driven source, wiki.gg growth is typically steady, but traffic can spike with new game launches or when established communities relocate to the site.

“If we need to double capacity for the website, we can push a few buttons to get twice the bandwidth and traffic support. By using AWS, it’s infinitely easier to manage our infrastructure,” Bryant explained.

Partnering for success

To date, Freedom Games titles have sold about three million units, and that number is quickly growing. The publisher is built on the idea of partnership, and prides itself on working with developers on multiple experiences, especially since it foregoes multi-project contracts. It takes a similar approach in sourcing its underlying technology.

“It’s easy to get things working in AWS, then scale when foundational ideas are proven,” Bryant concluded. “There’s a lot of helpful documentation available; read it and start small, then you can grow.”

Freedom Games currently also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon QuickSight.

Learn more about AWS for Games solutions can help developers of all sizes build, run, and grow their games.