As one of the most influential gaming companies in the world, Riot Games is dedicated to enhancing the gaming experience for hundreds of millions of players globally, thanks to popular titles like League of Legends and Valorant. With robust support from AWS, Riot Games has successfully modernized its game development, operations, and esports production, overcoming numerous challenges along the way.
Since the launch of League of Legends in 2009, Riot Games has relied on its own data centers to support operations. However, by 2017, this model struggled to meet the demands of global players. As a result, Riot Games decided to fully transition to the cloud, choosing AWS as its partner to leverage its extensive cloud services to enhance game operations and development.
In 2020, Riot Games launched a new tactical shooter, "VALORANT," which raised the bar for technical demands. One of the main challenges was addressing the "peekers' advantage" in shooting games, where attackers could see enemies early due to network latency. To tackle this issue, Riot Games leveraged AWS's global cloud infrastructure, including AWS Regions, Local Zones, and Outposts, ensuring the game servers achieved an update rate of 128 times per second (tick rate) and controlled network latency to under 35 milliseconds. This move significantly enhanced game fairness, providing players with a better competitive experience.
By leveraging AWS's elastic cloud capacity, Riot Games can swiftly scale their server resources without taking on long-term capital risks. If a game doesn't perform as expected, they can quickly shut down resources to minimize losses.
During the pandemic in 2020, as all offline esports events came to a halt, Riot Games teamed up with AWS to reinvent the remote live production workflow. By leveraging AWS Workspaces, employees were able to access cloud video encoding and production tools from home, successfully deploying the new system in just 11 days.
Currently, Riot Games' remote production centers are spread across the globe, with locations in Dublin, Ireland, and Seattle, USA. These innovative hubs enable producers, editors, and broadcasters to collaborate remotely and efficiently manage global event content, significantly enhancing the efficiency of esports production.
Modernizing the core game League of Legends is a monumental challenge, as it involves over 30 microservices managed by different teams. Riot Games has partnered with AWS to utilize Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) for container migration, optimizing the design specifically for League of Legends to meet its unique needs. For instance, AWS has provided short-term solutions for extended gaming sessions and ultimately developed long-term strategies to ensure the game remains operational throughout maintenance.
The introduction of AWS infrastructure has significantly enhanced the stability of the game. Prior to migrating to AWS, data center outages would cause downtime of 1 to 3 hours, but now these issues only lead to minor fluctuations that players hardly notice. The AWS API allows Riot Games to quickly retrieve and manage service configurations and resource usage, drastically reducing the time wasted in retrieving data compared to the past.
In just 36 months, Riot Games has achieved several significant milestones, showcasing how collaboration with AWS can lead to innovative solutions in game development, esports production, and global deployment. This behind-the-scenes journey highlights the immense potential of cloud technology, inspiring various businesses to explore more possibilities together with AWS.
