Cloud technology is transforming the way games are developed, hosted, and maintained. In this episode, host Devin Becker is joined by Chris Melissinos, AWS Principal Evangelist for video games, to discuss the growing role of cloud services in game development. Chris highlights how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is empowering developers with tools that reduce production costs, streamline workflows, and enable innovations like off-client AI processing. We also explore how AWS helps address challenges such as scalability, user-generated content moderation, and matchmaking for player-driven experiences.

The conversation dives into real-world examples of cloud-driven advancements, including projects like Raph Koster's Stars’ Reach, which envisions games and simulations hosted fully in the cloud. Chris shares insights into how cloud servers can help preserve game history, handle complex computing tasks, and improve collaboration across distributed teams. The discussion also touches on how cloud services support developers facing today’s rising production costs and how cloud infrastructure is shaping the future of game development. Whether you're a developer, designer, or producer, this episode offers a practical look at how cloud tech is unlocking new possibilities for the game industry.

We’d also like to thank Heroic Labs for making this episode possible! Thousands of studios have trusted Heroic Labs to help them focus on their games and not worry about gametech or scaling for success. To learn more and reach out, visit https://heroiclabs.com/?utm_source=Naavik&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Podcast 

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Devin: Hello everyone. I'm your host, Devin Becker, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Melissinos, Amazon Web Services’ principal evangelist for video games. AWS provides a suite of cloud-based tools and services for game devs to build, run, and scale out and grow their games with all kinds of features like multiplayer server hosting, backend infrastructure, analytics, AI stuff as well now.

And we'll definitely get into that. But today we're going to explore the ways that cloud-based services specifically could benefit games, game development, all that stuff. So, why don't we take it away here with you, Chris. Just could, could you quickly go over your background, the origin of like AWS’ specific involvement in games and what they do for games today.

Chris: Sure. Hey, Devin, thank you so much for having me on the program. Super excited to talk now on camera and you know, recording, instead of just the you know, the hour plus that we've spent the other day just going oh, yeah games people, games people. So, so yeah. Look, my name is Chris Melissinos. I'm the principal evangelist for video games here at AWS.

I’ve been in the games industry directly for about 25 years. I started my career focusing on java, actually game development and technology development that sun microsystems where I was the chief gaming officer and we founded sites like javagaming.org, which became the largest Web repository and form for game development. And of course, we've seen games like Worm Online and Minecraft and RuneScape, right? And, and of course the, you know, millions of mobile games that, that came out all running in Java. And so it was really a ton of fun to kind of help build that technology, start that community. I left the company in 2010, did some kind of consulting work and then went off to do a bunch of other crazy things, including building the art of video games exhibition for the Smithsonian American art museum.

So this was the very first art exhibition that the museum had done here in the United States, and it was a 40 year retrospective on the impact of video games on American culture and technology development and all these great things. And it was awesome to have that out there then, and we wrote a book, we do all kinds of tours and crazy stuff, a ton of fun.

And then I was over at Verizon. I spent seven and a half years there helping to lead media and entertainment strategy. And then, you know, when COVID hit, I had some friends over here at AWS that said you're doing a whole variety of things over there, you know, including things like robotics and, you know, virtualized power plants, all this kind of crazy stuff. What about getting back directly into games and game tech?

So I applied over here and was able to join awesome colleagues and amazing builders and video game fans here at, at AWS. I've been here four and a half years. And again, my current remit is as the principal evangelist. What that really means is connecting the culture and the importance of video games to the technologies and services that we develop, run, and, you know, bring together our partners to create opportunities for game developers to build, run, and grow breakthrough gaming experiences on AWS.

So I get to engage with the industry. I get to help bring the culture inside and I get to represent game developers, the voice of the developer inside the company to make sure that what we deliver you is what you need to get your games out there. That's it.

Devin: Awesome. That's it in a very short two or three minute nutshell, right?

Chris: Right. The condensed version. There you go.

Devin: Well, so, I mean, I, I know AWS does a lot of stuff. In general, but also a lot of stuff for games. So I, I'm really curious about like, what about what Amazon does excites you? I mean, obviously you came over there, you were excited, you're evangelizing. And usually that means you're excited about something, but specifically what you guys can do for game developers, what excites you about that?

Chris: You know, I mean, there's a whole variety of things. That's a really big question, right? So, if we kind of pare it down, what excited me most about joining the company was understanding that the, again, the tools, technology services and partners that AWS has can really positively impact the way we get games out to the world, how game developers can reach a global audience and do it securely, do it reliably, do it performantly, you know.

Now, you know, sometimes we talk to the industry, you know, people like AWS, like, what do you really do in video games? Well, AWS has actually been focused for more than 16 years, right, on video games, the games industry, some of the biggest games in the world, right? Use AWS like Fortnite and Roblox and, and, and League of Legends.

And then when you take a look at the, the partners that bring in their expertise from particular tools and technologies, we have over 300. Yeah. Partners, you know, game partners, right, which offer really a very broad and deep set of purpose-built services, prebuilt solutions, right? For everything from cloud game development, content creation, game backend and infrastructure monetization, like all of those things, in addition to AWS, when we talk about Amazon overall.

We have Amazon Game Studios, which announced they're doing the newest Tomb Raider game and doing the Lord of the Rings game. We have Prime Gaming, so if you happen to be an Amazon Prime subscriber, did you know you can get free games every month by going to Prime Gaming? Right, so, and we sell, you know, products at the storefront to go ahead and download those games.

Not to mention Twitch, which we also own. And so, you know, video games are spread across the company, in terms of the technologies and, and, and things that we bring to market. So we're, we're all in on games. It's, it's pretty awesome. But when I think about the opportunity for game developers, it's how do we remove the undifferentiated, the, the core, but undifferentiated things that are required to bring a game to market.

So let's break it down. Last year alone, more than 18, 000 games made it, made its way into the Steam marketplace. Massive amount of competition, not just from other game developers, but also we are constantly competing for share of time against, you know, TikTok and, and different social media platforms and, and video streaming, right?

So video games kind of fits in there. So not only do game developers have to compete with other games, they're also competing with this slice of time across all these different devices that a, a consumer may choose to spend their time in. Then you look at the cost of game development, right? We've seen that in game industry news where, you know, the cost of some of these games can spiral out of control at the highest end.

So how do we go ahead and let game developers just focus on building a great game not have to spend the time and additional money to either learn or build some of it again the core technologies underneath it they'll need? How do we help them kind of get that, that bit of the work out of the way so they can just focus On making a better game and then lastly is how do you then deploy on the technologies that you used to develop those games and scale to meet a massive audience globally?

Right. So when I was originally looking at this, I said, man, that is an incredible way to help kind of commoditize some of these, of that process, democratize information around that, let developers just focus on making the best game they can make. And we, as your partner, can help you scale that to meet demand around the world.

That's what made me super excited to join the company.

Devin: Awesome. It definitely sounds like you're excited, which is awesome. Perfect. But, you know, especially for the listeners, I do want to listen to someone reading out of a textbook here for sure. And I think you kind of answer my next question a little bit in what you just said, which is around like, what is the real benefit for this stuff to be cloud hosted as opposed to, you know, like, you could obviously be providing, you know, a docker image. People could be, you know, doing, I think there's lots of ways people could deploy these different kinds of tools and like, you know, self-hosted or just typical server providers, things like that, as opposed to the cloud infrastructure, the sort of deploying in the cloud and stuff that AWS is known for.

What's like the main benefit? Why would people Absolutely want to gravitate towards that as opposed to just these other solutions.

Chris: Well, I think, you know, again, it really depends. Depends on what kind of game you're building. It depends on, you know, your, your expertise or technical depth in using these things, right?

But what we're trying to do is to allow developers to not have to become Experts in some of the kind of the core infrastructure that sits underneath their game to be able to operate their game and what that does is that frees up the design time. It frees up development of features, right?

Taking that same time, that currency that is now available back to you, right? Time definitely has direct currency and allows you to just go in and focus on making a better game. I always kind of simplify by saying, look, my best friends make art right for living. That's what they do. And they, and the success of that allows them to pay their employees and feed their studio, feed their families and continue making more art.

So the way I think about it, and it really comes from this perspective is. How do we make it easier for them to make more art, make it reliable so more and more people can experience that art and give them a runway to continue making more art. That is really the crux of what we do and how we do that, right?

There are three, again, key reasons why people choose AWS to run their games, right? So once again, Accelerate Game Development, like I mentioned, more than 300 different game partners with these broad solutions. So you don't have to try to figure those out. We have partners that can help you. Second was that you can launch and run your game confidently, right?

Launch day really, really matters, right? And we all know we've seen this before, right? A failure on day one, right? Can just kind of catch the, that wave of sentiment and be catastrophic for a game. So with more than 16 years of experience in helping game companies launch globally. Again, like I said, some of the biggest games like Fortnite, Roblox League, 750 million gamers worldwide play games every month on technologies and services built right by AWS.

And then third piece is how do you grow and engage player communities on a global scale, right? Because games are no longer encapsulated to one particular platform or one particular region. It is a global art form. It is a global community. So you need to be able to scale and manage at a global level.

And so that's where we really lean in. And that's why game developers like, uh, developing and, and again, building, running and growing their games on AWS.

Devin: Nice. I mean, and that's kind of broad strokes to some extent, right? So I guess the question I would have is like, as a followup to that is, is what do you think are the biggest challenges game developers have right now in terms of what they're dealing with and what you guys could do to help solve that?

What is that? All that stuff, you know, it's great. Big things. But like, what are the specific things that are you're actually just like the obvious stuff? Like, Oh God, yeah, I definitely need that because I have these key problems.

Chris: Sure. All right. So we talked, we, we spoke really about the three big things that they're facing right now.

Massive competition, very expensive to make games and finding an audience and being able to scale to meet them. So let's talk about a solution that speaks directly to a key part of this. So we have an offering called Amazon game lift. And Gamelift is really designed for instance based games. And the core technology, what it allows you to do, is just spin up the servers that your players demand, as needed, globally.

So rather than you trying to figure out, okay, which, you know, raw compute do I have to go ahead and basically overbuild for or buy and maybe keep idle and pay for that in different regions. If you get that scaling incorrect, It can be catastrophic from a financial perspective. From a player perspective, game lift observes where people are requesting to play the game.

It finds the server that is closest to the group that is going to play lowest ping, highest performance spins it up. Your players just play in that environment. And then as soon as they're done, the server shuts down. So you're, you're getting to select the best server within our infrastructure closest to them for the best experience.

And you're only paying for what the players use, which is incredible. So it really almost kind of becomes this pseudo custom, you know, server infrastructure for yourself. That can spin those servers up and bring them down and again, maximize, you know, the enjoyment for your players while minimizing the cost that you have to consume.

And then there are other technologies around that. So one of the things that used to be only available within Amazon game lift is another service we have called flex match. We, which we have now enabled for people to use even outside of game lift. So flex match right enables you to match a connect up to 200 players in a single game session based on your custom matching rules that you define, right?

So you can choose to match people based on skill latency or any custom criteria that you want, but it's. Simple, but it has a very powerful rules language, really makes it easy to create robust player matchmaking, which we all know the communities nowadays, like that's the lifeblood of online live ops-based games, right?

We offer things like container support. So if you want to go ahead and actually run your game inside of a container and then have multiple containers operating your games that are distributed globally. You can do that, too. We also using things like AWS shield help to safeguard those servers from network and transport layer like distributed denial of service attacks, right?

So. We've seen companies like Frag Lab, GungHo Behavior, which did Dead by Daylight, and 50 million players on Gamelift, right, playing in their game. Fatshark, which did Warhammer 40K Darktide, and we just announced the other day that we hit 100 million players Supporting 100, 000, 000 players for a single game, so we're talking.

So what we're doing is we're taking the expertise that we have in that kind of global scaled infrastructure and our passion around video games, the understanding of what game developers need and creating a service layer on top of it kind of abstracts that hardware layer from you. So you can just focus on building a great game, right?

Maximizing, you know, the performance for your players and minimizing cost. It's pretty awesome.

Devin: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like definitely stuff that I think people have to kind of wrap their heads around a little bit and see where it makes sense for them, especially, you know, even stuff like the matchmaking rules.

And I'm kind of curious if, like, you guys provide some level of expertise of, like, best practices and things like that for those, because a lot of people are often new into that space, right? And there's, there's not necessarily like easy stuff that can always copy and paste people. You will do try and do things like Elo and things like.

That, but it's not, you know, always obvious, but I think, I think the, the broader topic of most people's minds right now, especially given the last like year or so of just massive layoffs that still continue to this day, unfortunately, , is when it comes to like cloud technology and things like that for games, is there anything within the cloud, just infrastructure, technology, different things that you could do that really helps deal with this really ballooning production cost is the big issue, right?

Where people, it's not necessarily. That games are floppy because the games are floppy that are too expensive to flop. , as well as even like, not just at the AAA level, but down at the AA level and all these even smaller studios having to shut down, is there anything like a cloud can do to help solve that?

Or is that something that's just for like AAA game developers?

Chris: Sure. I mean, there are quite a number of things that we can utilize the cloud for to go and help reduce development costs. So for example, if you're building up a studio that happens to be distributed, right, which we know more and more, especially in the indie space and kind of into like the single a space we're, we're seeing more and more of that.

So doing things like having game production in the cloud where you don't have to ship a workstation to somebody track where all those assets are going. You know, able to provide an entire development environment through basically a browser right stream down to the developer means that you can not only control costs and you're not having kind of that capital outlay for depreciating assets.

Right. You can make sure everybody is on the same version of a tool. You can make sure that, you know, patches are all done correctly and kind of keep everybody together. And all of those things help to reduce the cost and speed time to market. So again, we look at the kind of those cloud platforms, the you.

Second one is leaning into partner solutions instead of trying to build it all yourself. So when we talk about all the different partners we have, and you mentioned, I believe you mentioned something about, you know, like the live services and things like that. So we have, you know, partners like Beamable and Heroic Labs, excel bite that provide all of those live ops tools and services running on AWS.

So if you're already on AWS and you have your game development pipeline built and everything else, all of those. Services, their offerings plug directly in, right? So we, uh, we minimize the pain of integration of those things and, but also give you choice. It isn't, we will have a prescriptive way to do things, but that may not be the only way to do it.

Right, which is pretty awesome. So you get the flexibility of our partners and their expertise in those particular areas. That's the second way. The third way to and I keep talking about this time and cost reduction. We provide what we call guidances. Right. So if you're coming to AWS, you've never used AWS before and you go, Oh my goodness, there's, you know, 200 and X, you know, services, there's thousands of different features.

Like I just need to get a game back end up and running. Well, we've developed things like the game back end hosting guidance. So I did a video on one of our channels. It's the AWS for games channel on YouTube and Twitch with one of our awesome architects, Yuho Yontanen. And we said, I said, listen, man, I want to get you on camera, and we're going to go ahead and see how fast it will take from zero to having a server up and running on AWS connected into unity.

And typically, you know, a developer will download docs, watch videos and kind of, you know, fumble their way through all these different pieces. And he went from zero to fully connected in 21 minutes, right? So what we're doing with these guidances is that we follow our well architected approach. We provide code snippets, integration pieces, architectural diagrams, all this information available out there on our git repositories, and you can go ahead and stand up that back end and just start building your game right faster than you ever could before.

And we provide similar types of guidances around building a game analytics pipeline or, as we mentioned, game production in the cloud. So we're continuing to lean in, listen to our customers, listen to developers, and try to provide them the information that gets them up to speed. They don't have to worry about becoming experts on building on those back end pieces and can just be experts at building the best video game they can. Pretty awesome.

Devin: Awesome. Yeah, I definitely. I'd like to see people take advantage of that as much as possible. Yes. , and moving away from, from AWS in general, right, just into, into more cloud gaming, specifically, you know, one, one thing that's been interesting to see is, you know, obviously you have the rise of cloud gaming, especially with like Xbox Game Pass, providing that feature now, Stadia, which kind of came and gone, GeForce Now, which also, you know, tries to keep, obviously NVIDIA is kind of all over the place with, especially with AI at the moment, but they have that as well.

I'm interested in, in this space that we see coming out of, uh, RAF Costa, specifically around stars, reach this idea of cloud sort of, served like game as opposed to, you know, hosting, , some third party game and streaming that it's like the entire game is sort of experience is on the cloud coming to you and then you're kind of interfacing with that.

You know, what are your thoughts in that space and sort of where we go, whether it relates to AWS or not, just the cloud gaming in general.

Chris: Sure. Well, as I mentioned, you know, there's so many different groups in the company that focus on the games industry. And one that I didn't mention is the Luna team, right?

So we have a cloud. Streaming game service called Luna. And if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can also play games, some of the games for free every month, right? And that's directly on your TV on a fire stick or on, you know, select televisions, you connect a controller and off you go. And you're, you're, you're streaming those games, but it's important to.

Distinguish what we mean when by what we mean when we say cloud gaming, right? So there's a bunch of different ways to think about this game production in the cloud, all that infrastructure in the back end. And you have developers connecting in and utilizing manipulating those services to create their game.

You have cloud games So games like stars reach and you know we were talking before about other games that were being developed that use massive compute massive memory pools and things like that on the server side to create the world that people then connect to stuff you just couldn't do on the client side just because of how.

You know, expensive it would be, right? The type of multiple GPUs people would have to have massive memory pools. Like we don't have those systems in our home typically. So you have games that are written for the cloud that you connect to. And then you have cloud streaming of games. And those are traditional games that are then running on infrastructure.

And we're just streaming the frames down to you. All three of those, those approaches to cloud gaming, when we talk about it that way, really fulfill different needs, right? And there are. And as you and I were talking before we actually even started the recording here today is it depends it depends on what type of game, you know, you're looking to build the great thing about cloud streaming of games is that it provides the lowest friction to get people to be able to sample test and try your game. Right. And so it's just a click and off you're running and now I can go ahead and play this. Now some people that like we were saying, you know, before, uh, again, before we started recording that we're camping out waiting for 50, 90s, right? Um, are not necessarily the target market for this because they want, you know, 300 frames a second, 4k HDR, 10, right?

All this stuff crushing there. But that audience also isn't the mass amount of players, right? When we think about 3. 32 million or billion players in the world, the average age of gamers being 36 years old, women over the age of 35 being one of the largest segment of online players, right? The world of games is so much bigger than just the bleeding edge stuff, which I love.

Right. And I didn't wait out for a 50 90, but you know, I was a little jealous that other people could. So again, when we, when we think about how we utilize the cloud, there's different ways to do it. So again, cloud streaming of games. Is something that the whole industry continues to move towards, we continue to build out again, something we support, as I mentioned before, that game production, the cloud, how do you stand up your virtualized workspace, be able to manage, you know, access to them, be able to manage those, those resource pools and be able to distribute those production tools from the cloud stream through, you know, again, a browser or a dedicated application to any of your developers anywhere in the world.

And then, of course, the third one is how do you build something on the back and that really requires that compute stars reach is. Amazing. If you haven't checked it out, definitely go ahead and check it out in the steam store You know look up, online ralph costar, you know, one of our game industry legends I interviewed him actually on the game industry legend series on my on my channel as well and you know ralph's background starting all the way at ultima online and then star wars galaxies and , we were talking about meta place and then you know on to his his current endeavor You know, Ralph's thinking is so visionary and so big that you need web infrastructure.

You need compute infrastructure to be able to enable the type of game that he's created, which. In theory could be just unlimited in scope, right? In scale. It's a phenomenal builder world. Type of game that you know, everything is deformable everything has physics applied to it. It's, it's. It's absolutely incredibl, but could you do this type of game just on a client machine?

You can't, you can't. And so we're going to start to see more games that I believe that will leverage cloud infrastructure to create this, you know, these experiences that just can't be driven by client based or session, just purely session based games, right? I don't know if that answers your question, but those are a lot of thoughts.

Devin: No, I mean, as a follow up to that too, I'm kind of curious, like, because UGC has become a big thing, right? Like, whether you call it UGC or mods or one of the other millions of terms that we've used over decades of it. I, I think there's an interesting place where, or sort of cloud gaming and UGC interact or intersect.

Do you think there's like some possibility for that to help bridge that future? Mainly on the topic of like. User content, right? When it comes to user content, if I upload content, now all of a sudden that has to be served to everyone else playing the game. And then when you have this huge glut of content, now all of a sudden it's like, do I download everything everyone's ever made?

Obviously, like that's probably not the case. Then you have the blockchain side of it, where I have to reach out to the blockchain for every single piece of content everyone's made and all those kinds of problems. How does cloud address that or not? Like, is that something where you see some future for cloud?

So whether that be like. On scalable hosted servers or that some other type of technology, you know, like the what sort of what rafts doing those ideas around UGC I seem like pretty critical at the moment as we're moving to that that sort of world I mean even when you look at you know Roblox or Fortnite They have to like end up hosting all this content that people are putting up not just on the you know The scripting site but also on the actual 3d models and things like that.

Chris: Yeah, so UGC Of course, it's here to stay now the funny thing about UGC and you just Triggered this thought for me, Devin, and I were talking about this being somebody who is, um, you know, into game history. I should have mentioned I sit on the board of the video game history foundation as well, right?

So for me, like getting our history, right? Preserving our history, elevating as are from all those things are important to me, but I started thinking about, so here's an actual compute Gazette magazine. This is mine from 1985. And when I think about UGC, like the great thing about these magazines when you've got these as, you know, I did as a kid programming on a Commodore VIC 20, here's all the code at the back of the book for the games that are on the front.

So, so many game developers that grew up in that era, that's how we learned to program, was we started writing in code and then we'd say, wait a minute, this says player equals blank. If I change that to five, what happens when I rerun the game? Oh, it changed to a five. What is what's this? You know, what's this data set here?

That's supposed to be the graphics. Oh, I can change those. So we started modding those games and that code and learning how to program along along with it. We were doing UGC back when UGC required you to type it in from a magazine. So this is it's not any surprise to me That now that we've given, I talked about commoditization of tools and technologies, the best time to be a game developer, right?

Because tools are almost free, right? Commodity and democratize information communities on discord in forums, right? Within other communities. And then those platforms teach you how to do all this stuff. So it's no wonder that we have an entire. Generation or two that's not growing expecting to be able to change things and modify things and personalize those experiences there but that also means that the companies that provide what feel more like platforms sometimes like Roblox for example or.

You know, UEFN means that they are now dealing with a deluge of content coming in. How do we go ahead and make sure that we're holding, you know, copyrights and, and, you know, properties and protections around that content? How do we make sure that it abides by laws in particular regions? How do we make sure that people aren't ripping off each, each other's things?

How do we make sure? we're analyzing this in 3D as a 3D mesh versus a 2D object, right? These are all questions that are coming at game developers, right? And these UGC platforms really, really fast. The good thing is that again, having scalable infrastructure in the backend to help in the, the compute requirements and the memory requirements and the data requirements that absolutely critical to making sure that the company can continue to operate.

People have a good experience in there, and we're able to kind of sift and filter some of that content that shouldn't be there, or maybe belongs in a completely different community, right? It's all about the constant refinement of the gameplay loop and the community loop, right? That these technologies have.

So again, UGC is not going to go away at all, right? We're just going to continue to see more mods. Yes, that's how so many other game developers learned to play. But we also want to make sure that we are giving. The the as an industry the right tools and services to developers so they can continue to protect their ip they can continue to open to communities and they can continue to have a revenue pipeline let's make games right we don't want one and done we want.

Game developers to be able to make more art. I always say make more art, more moments of meaningful connection, more smiles. That's it. Like that, that's, that's the goal.

Devin: You're here first, Chris, trying to bring more smiles. I mean, no coincidence. That's the Amazon logo, right?

Chris: Okay. Now you just brought that up.

And I never even thought about that, but I'm constantly someone there. That's me. I'm constantly smiling. So we're good. We're good. Cool.

Devin: Yeah. For those of you watching the video, he definitely is. Very, very excited about what he's doing, which is fantastic. You brought up something interesting actually around the, , the copyright makes me think, you know, we have the DMCA stuff and, and I'm sure other countries have their particular ways of going about it, but this idea that then like, We, we don't have the ability to scale up what internal teams are doing when it comes to monitoring for copyright, especially when they may not be familiar with everyone's copyrighted content, right?

They can't be familiar with every piece of content that could be replicated in a UGC platform to know that that's copyright infringement without someone reporting it. Do you think there's some possibility then for say the cloud infrastructure to open up this possibility for third party, you know, IP holders to be able to go at like, you know, through an API or whatever it is to review content and be able to flag and notify, you know, say fortnight or Roblox.

I hate like this, this content violates our thing and it can be put up for review or whatever process there is. I mean, DMCA unfortunately is very much like, just shut it off now and we'll review it later. Unfortunately, not, not doing the review it later. So often, unfortunately, as, as YouTubers tend to find out the hard way.

But that idea that then maybe then they can, instead of trying to manage it all themselves, they go like, Hey, we're just a host. You guys can come in through this sort of service we're providing, whether that even be something that, you know, AWS providing as sort of a built in thing for content, you know, blobs or whatever that are hosting that to come in and review that, like, is there, do you think there's some possibility there for that to help?

UGC scale up without worrying about the copyright issues much?

Chris: So I, I think so, right? It feels like we're going to continue to move on that continuum, right? To, to get there without going into specifics of different services, you know, I'm happy to go ahead and connect you to people that may be better versed in those things, but it is something that we are, you know, as an industry, we constantly explore.

So let's take it outside of the realm of, you know, the, 3D objects and 2D objects. Let's put it into something that is more, that people face on a daily basis, right? Which if you're playing online at any time, it's about toxicity within communities, for example. And so what, you know, one of the partners that we work with, Modulate, they have a, a solution called ToxMod.

And the idea is that it can, in real time, start to understand Intention right understand language understand age understand behavior and be able to connect this piece together that say not to quiet your conversation but to make sure that you're connected to people that also you know kind of fit into either the same type of gameplay style community style those sorts of things or give people the ability to shut certain things off that they don't want to see or don't want to hear.

Right as they're playing the game. Now, I'm also a big proponent is that, you know, the, the authority of an author of a game that is the game they made. That is the story they tell, but giving, giving tools to people to allow them to again, change, perhaps the way they're experienced the game. It's great because everybody is, you know, it's different.

It's going to take the content different. Let's get enjoyment out of playing for everybody. But again, these tools like talks might allow you to kind of look at the, the, the chat and, and the communication that's happening in these games and understand how to make it a better experience for everybody playing.

Now, when we think about, you know, the complexity, Going back to the asset issue. We're pretty good overall as a technology industry of looking at 2d or linear content, right? We can understand rights issues in music we can understand copyright and and things like that for images, although That gets fuzzier every day, right?

With a lot of the AI tools that are coming up, but when we're talking about 3D options, it's much more complex because what happens when you have somebody that places a bunch of 3D objects into an environment and it looks, you know, innocuous.

Devin: But if you kind of stand in one particular way, you'll deal with that specifically with the old TTP problem from specific angles.

Chris: Exactly right, right? And we see this like in museums, like art pieces where an artist will hang pieces from a ceiling or on the floor. And if you stand in one spot, it converges to make a picture, right? So we need more of those tools to make sure that the communities hold together, that it doesn't sour the experience for the player base and adversely, Okay, you know, put additional strain pressure or possibly even cratering a studio, right, right on them. So as an industry, these are all things that we're concerned about and, you know, continue to kind of to figure out the, the important thing to remember too, because, you know, some may watch this and be like, well, you know, I should be able to kind of say what I want and do what I want.

It's like you can, but they also have a responsibility to every other player that's in there too. Right. And so again, I think these tools are going to help to create a better overall experience for the vast majority of players and allow people to find each other with same types of tastes, same types of play style that they may not have been able to find before because you're kind of swimming in the sea of, well, let me look at ping time, right?

Let me look at, you know, at either latency or round trip there, right? Ping. And I'm just going to, you know, kind of lump you together. And then my second order is, you know, where you ranked that kind of thing. Right. So that's the way we used to do it. We're going to get better with these tools of making the gameplay experience better for everybody.

Devin: I love the idea of matchmaking people based off toxicity. Like, so let the, let the people that are, that are toxic chat with each other, or just the idea of like, obviously that's, it's maybe a little farfetched to think this is like easily doable in the near future, but the idea of like different styles of sense of humor being matched, whether it's like, I'm only offensive if you don't have, I share my sense of humor, but if we all share the sense of humor, then we're all.

Getting along, but that's, you know, it's just like one of those things that obviously, you know, the AI or whatever it is, has to understand sense of humor well enough to be able to do that. I mean, maybe we're getting there, maybe we're not.

Chris: Obviously language models help with that, but that is, that is a funny, but you're absolutely right.

And it's probably not right to just call it toxicity, right? It is language, right? And so it's understanding the context in which language, you know, Is used, you know, if it's two people that are playing that have been friends for 30 years and, you know, somebody is like, oh, my God, you know, when I get you, I'm going to kill you.

Well, that's a that's very different than an actual threat. So understanding the context in which we communicate. And in the groups, we communicate super important, right? So look, I think all of this is in service of the player. All of this is in trying to go ahead and make the environments the best they can possibly be for people that just want to go ahead and play.

And, you know, at AWS, we provide that that again, that infrastructure layer, those technologies that allow for these new Solutions coming from the industry to be able to operate performantly, cost effectively and globally at scale. That's really our goal is to enable the possibility space.

Devin: So, I mean, then going back to the infrastructure, the cloud infrastructure stuff, you as someone that is heavily involved in video game story and stuff, and I know there's been a lot of pushes late that lately with, you know, good old games, things like that, one of the issues that.

Tends to come up as single player games. Okay. That's manageable. Right. You just keep a copy of it. I mean, even the internet archive has like playable games on it. Right. But then when it comes to multiplayer games, you have the issue of the servers just being now, like I got excited to get the command and conquer remastered, whatever it's like play command and conquer four again.

And it's like, Oh, sorry. The servers don't exist though. So you can't actually play multiplayer. And it's like, well, that's kind of what I wanted to do. I'm kind of curious about this idea of, you know, you're talking about spinning up servers on demand. Is there then the possibility for there to be a, you know, historian infrastructure around these games that, you know, maybe has some funding to cover the costs, but where people that want to play old games that require servers can then spin up that server, they could play, then it winds it back down.

So it's not sitting there incurring costs. You're having to run servers for every game that ever existed all the time is just on demand, or at least enough to make it playable, , you know, Whether that be scaled down playability or not, I think it's an interesting angle to preserve these sort of multiplayer environments that may not have anyone else playing without you getting your friends or anything.

But right now you just can't do a period.

Chris: Yeah, no, it's it is a problem that game historians and organizations that seek to preserve the industry and this everything from the strong museum of play up in Rochester, New York, which is amazing. They opened a 90 000 square foot addition to the museum That was just astonishing and I had a chance to go in before the crowds were in there so I could film everything by myself Which was awesome, and I have that video posted on our aws4games channel on youtube as well Yeah, it's it is that balance between Rights holders and what they want to do with the content that they've created and the technology they create and sometimes it can get really difficult to untangle who actually owns the rights to something as it passes from hand to hand as we're looking at different developers that may be involved over time.

So it's making sure that you can account for all of those things. Then it's also even if you're able to take, you know, an older player server like that and get it up and running, there's still a cost. To actually running the infrastructure, somebody has to put the bill for that, right? And then, you know, again, you run to legal precedent and things like that, that we can, you know, constantly work through.

So having organizations like the Entertainment Software Association, there in Washington, right on behalf of the games industry, , and other organizations, right? These are conversations that are going on all the time. I don't have a clear answer for you because once again, it depends There are some companies that said hey, you know what 10 years after we shut down.

We're just open sourcing everything You know have at it go and we've seen that happen quite a bit right from some big titles some big titles as well others it's like I don't even know who to go ask about this because They're out of the industry, the company shut down, documents are gone, right? Point of this, when we thinking about preserving the ability to do this, donating to and engaging in preservation organizations are critical, because if there are a lot enough voices, that tends to carry, right?

But I'm all for making sure that we preserve as much of our history correctly as we can, because we're an industry that's only 50 years young. Which means that some of the people that founded the industry are still working in the industry. That's amazing. So we can tell the true stories. We can find those right pieces.

But when we're dealing with art that is then commercialized, it becomes a bit more difficult. So this is not an AWS perspective. This is my perspective, right? Being in the industry for a long time is, how do we go ahead and Help to make sure that we are preserving as much as we can giving people access as needed, right?

Well again still being respectful of copyright holders and people who created this stuff, right? I'll give you an example of one thing I ran into was a particular game that was in the art of video games exhibition where we went to the company that we thought owned the rights They're like well this version of the game.

We didn't actually make It was made by this other company. So we actually can't grant you rights to it, even though all the characters, all the information is our property. So you need to go find them. And then, of course, they were like, you know, sure, you know, sure you can. And but it was this very weird moment of you don't own this.

These are your characters. It's like, Nope. No, we can't give you rights to this. So it can get very messy. When we think about, you know, preserving our history. It's super important, something that I'm very dedicated to leaning in and assisting.

Devin: Maybe at some point we just get a sort of like, pseudo public domain type policy, where it just basically says, hey, if your game's older the next amount of time, you still have the rights to it and everything, but we also are allowed to do this sort of project just for historical purposes. You know, like for preservation or something.

Chris: So yeah, no, absolutely true. But here's another thought about that. So even if a game, let's say, has gone out of production, right? Or, you know, it's, it's being wound down, but the company still exists and they still building online games. It could be that some of the technology they're using for their back end for connectivity is carried over from those older games.

So if we opened it up, it also opens up their new content to exploits, right? Because now you're putting all the code in the hands of people that rightly so, right? Want to figure out how the machines work and what can they do with it, right? So again, it may not be as very cut and dry. In terms of saying, well, you no longer make this game.

Give us all the code. It's, it's never that way. If they have it still, right? Oh, I got one more for you. There was a game that a friend of mine who was working for a company that did an emulation game service all licensed content back in the mid 2000s. And they were looking for a game and Company that made the game didn't have any source code.

They didn't have a build of it. They didn't have the art assets They're like, how can you not have this code for a game that includes your titular character? And they said, we just don't know where it is company, you know, division shut down and move. They found all the source code on a floppy disk in the drive of one of the sound engineers who had the machine at home, like under like paint cans in the garage.

So they were able to resurrect this and, you know, preserve it. We shouldn't have to do that, right? So, yeah, it's, it's game preservation is a wild space.

Devin: Yeah. It's a, it's a tricky thing to solve. Obviously it's not like it is where you just throw it on a drive or scan it in or whatever, but, you know, some, something that needs to be done and I'm glad you're, you're helping fight that fight on another topic related to cloud stuff, just cause I want to like cover a bit of breadth here since, you know, there's a lot of things to talk about with it.

One space that seems potentially interesting that maybe you could speak on is this idea that right now there's, you know, cross platform stuff where people port stuff. There's attempts to train you to cross play and then you have even situations where Microsoft is like, not necessarily bowing out of hardware, but they're being like more hardware agnostic and things like that.

And then you've got Apple on the other side where they're just like trying to show off these full scale ports running on their phones. Do you see possibilities for, I mean, besides just straight like Luna or GeForce Now or Xbox, you know, streaming, Offering possibilities for. Expanding out a game's title without this being this long, complicated process about hiring someone like aspire or whatever to spend this long process porting it.

And sometimes those be honest, those ports from companies don't always turn out all that great that it could have over open up these possibilities to expand out games, especially, you know, onto the mobile side where mobile gamers tend to be sometimes it's different audience, but at the end of the day.

All the core gamers still own phones as a, you know, as, as Blizzard infamously asked whether they do or not, but it's a situation where, you know, maybe there's some possibility for that to open up that beyond just the, let's, let's stream it for you hosted. I mean, do you think there's some, some interesting possibilities there?

Chris: Yeah, I absolutely do. And I think, again, it goes back to something we talked about before, which it depends like what, what is the game that you're playing now? Core gamers like you and I, yeah, you know, you may stream down, you know, a full on 120 hour game, you know, like a red dead type of game or stuff like that and play it on mobile.

But the vast majority of people don't necessarily understand the value there, right? Because those types of things, I call those big tentpole games, like the Spielbergian experience, like you want to sit down and lean in big screens, you know, big audio. Now, what you may also want to be able to do is still engage in moments of time with that technology.

And that's where cloud streaming of games can come in. But I think in addition to the cloud streaming, which again, everything from those bigger games all the way to, you know, simple games are there. I think that there, we are approaching a real opportunity once again. About the browser, but web being a, a container model for delivering content.

Modern HTML5 through things like WebGL and WebAssembly allow you now to create, create games, port over games that run inside a browser container, but have access to the GPU, have access to memory, have access to cache, have access to, you know, to audio directly. So in essence, it is a native game. It's just using.

The html5 is a container to ship the code, download it, you then, and compile it in real time. Then you add that to the fact that our devices continue to get faster and cheaper and you add faster connectivity across the world, right? Where in things like millimeter wave 5g, you're talking about sub five millisecond return from, or, you know, latency to the node.

So 10 milliseconds back, and typically now you have compute right behind those nodes. So we're entering this, this stage where things again, like games that could be delivered through a browser to a mass audience, along with cloud streaming of games to deliver those really deep, you know, render crushing, you know, massive experiences to that same person is now really at our doorstep.

That to me is awesome. I think the second big thing is as an industry, when we start thinking about the value of video games from an engagement perspective, it's shifting that lens from video game to the act of play, right? I want to be able to play and engage in the things that I love from wherever I am.

We've done that for all different types of content, but it's all linear content. Interactive content has always been a bit of different. It's always been a bit different. So I always like to say, what about my big game that I want people to play is appropriate in mobile, appropriate for a 30 second engagement.

And how do I create the kind of that connective tissue in the experience to allow people to continue to have those moments of enjoyment with the content that they love that then accrues to when they sit down in front of the big screen and play the game. Huge opportunities, right, to do this stuff. And we're just getting started.

That's why I said earlier, it is the best time to be a game developer, because again, access to tools, access to audience, access to compute is at the kind of lowest cost and lowest barrier to entry than ever before, right? So the games I expect to see over the next five, seven years that lean into those things are going to be awesome.

Right, they're gonna be awesome.

Devin: It seems, well, it seems like we're kind of converging in that way in a way that maybe people aren't calling out as much because you have the future of gamers right now are pretty much on fortnight and Roblox and stuff right with the younger generations. And that's I mean, barring apples.

Tiff with epic was, was totally playable on mobile Roblox does quite well in mobile. So you have this audience that's still technically like the future core audience and in these like sort of forever games playing on mobile. And then you have this other convergence from the core gamers, not even acknowledging the fact that Steam Deck and all the competitors coming out have actually pushed core gamers towards this more portable situation, especially with people aging up.

I noticed, for example, when Stadia was big with, you know, at least a certain audience. Dads were huge on it. Like this idea, like, Hey, I can actually play a game now that I just never had time to play because I could play it on my phone. I could play it on this device. I could play it on my TV, this sort of portability of these core experiences outside of just the living room TV and the computer at home or the console that maybe has some other situations to try to do, obviously those are, you know.

Sort of coming out now, partially because valve made their huge push and partially because the hardware is sort of catching up with this ability to sort of run without melting your hands off or, you know, draining the battery instantly. But, you know, maybe there's some in between. Like I heard even that, you know, for example, GeForce now, you know, might be coming to steam deck and you have it, , now on quest headsets, right?

You've got the Xbox cloud. I believe there was some playability of GeForce now on there. So this idea that you kind of shift these experiences to these other platforms. That's what I'm kind of curious where this, maybe you can help with that. Where maybe the hardware just can't work that way. Or, you know, we have maybe a controller in the screen and an internet connection, but maybe not the hardware processing.

Even when you're talking about the browser based games, you end up with a situation where the processing like can kind of get there, but you still end up looking at most HTML5 experiences are still like very light casual games, right? We're not finding that sort of mid core audience. You're not seeing a lot of 4X games, even for example, for that mid core audience.

In that sort of HTML5 space, do you think there's this, this in between space where we start to sort of smooth that out so it's not just him, everyone in these divided camps?

Chris: Sure. Yeah, I think look, the reason we haven't seen in HTML5 space is it took time for the technology to actually coalesce and be proven and demonstrate we're starting to see more and more discussion around HTML5 as a delivery mechanism for the Video games, right?

Devin: Well, let's be honest, some of that is just trying to get around the 30 percent fees and things like that.

Chris: Well, I mean, if that, but if that typically, you know, if there are economic pressures in any system, right? It creates new opportunities for innovation, right? New opportunities to go ahead and build on that. There's been no shortage of web games for years. And what is super interesting, right? So, you know, people are still playing original runescape, original Java runescape. I was on a plane traveling cross country, sat down next to this very nice couple. We started having a conversation of what they do.

Then the guy opens up his laptop, gets on the plane, Wi Fi fires up old school, Java based runescape and is playing it on. Airplane wifi and you can download both versions on your phone, even like old and new, which is right, right. So when we think about, you know, video games and we think about the audience for them. It doesn't always have to be the, again, the Pushing the renderer to its edge, most amount of lights, particle systems, physics, that's not, that's not just what video games are.

So, I love to use this example, not every person that plays Candy Crush plays World of Warcraft, but just about every World of Warcraft player has played Candy Crush. Like, it's not a two way door, right? It is a one way door. So, you start to think about, what are the type of experiences that I want to build for the audience, my building it for this core group.

That's just gonna, you know, again, go out and buy, you know, a 5090 because they need to go out and play this game right now. Or are you building for a mass audience? So I think as art as communication, right? As experience, the gamut is massively wide. It's, it's infinite. And we haven't even really scratched the surface of that.

So, why haven't people been using HTML5 as much now? It took a while for the technology to catch up. It's standardized across an international body. People have to adopt that into builds of the browser. So, that all takes time. It takes a lot of time. , but we're at the point now where there's a lot of game developers going, Huh, that really does a whole lot more than it did three years ago when I looked at it.

Right? And now it's part of a standard. Then we start thinking about the cyclical nature of things. Forever games. Yes, right now we have a handful of them. But do we think that's going to be the only way people play? No. Everyone said, Oh, handheld gaming is dead. The switch kind of went, what? What are you talking about?

Here's handheld gaming. And then the steam deck. I don't know. Peace. I remember the point. PC games are dead. Nobody's going to build a PC game. It is the number one platform being developed for right now in the industry. So there is no any one particular right answer. Things change over time. But the one awesome thing that you among the awesome things you mentioned, one of them was The youngest generation playing so much of these games and, , wanting UGC and all those things among gen alpha video games are the number one form of content engagement, period.

Then you add that to the multiple generations in between that grew up playing video games as part of their steady diet and the Gen Xers that grew up as the first video gamers, gamers raising gamers, we're now entering an era where virtually The entire generation pool grew up with video games as a normalized part of entertainment and content and an art.

That's a huge change, right? So, 50 years young, really saw that massive climb over the past 25 years, and it's now the largest revenue producing entertainment medium in the world. And we're just getting started. More tools, more accessibility, more cloud infrastructure, more access to information than ever before.

Go build a game that connects the world. That, that's what I want. I just gotta figure out how to control our budgets, apparently. Yeah, but again, you know, the fact that you can have somebody create a game like Vampire Survivor. I mean, all of these games that are created by single people using tools that are practically free, learn how to use them because of the communities information available out there.

Okay, like you can do it to, you know, the, the analogy to that was listened to Conan O'Brien needs a friend. I love the podcast and he had been still around.

Devin: They were talking about severance, right?

Chris: And severance apparently was a spec script, meaning that it wasn't even supposed to be serious. It's like somebody wrote this and it was so compelling that it just got picked up and off they go.

And the comment that been silver is making is look, there's space for the individual to create something right that explodes. Video games have it in some cases, easier in some cases, more difficult, difficult in terms of the amount of content coming out, but easier in that you can get access to these tools, create and just go out to an audience like without asking anybody's permission.

It's awesome. It's awesome.

Devin: Well, speaking of games and focusing more on the game side of things, as well as the future, I'm kind of curious outside of like, you know, something like stars reach, do you see anything like really innovating using the cloud in a way that's beyond just, I'm hosting my game in the cloud or I'm using cloud servers, like something that's really like, I don't want to say cloud native, but something that is taking this idea of this tech and using it in a way that's new or novel or actually pushing things forward.

Chris: Yeah, without. So you're asking me a question that I'm really racked my brain to think of, , that I can

Devin: Well, it's an easy one. That's why we're doing it to the end, right?

Chris: So I mean, I can't name any particular one off time. I know there's a lot of experimentation going on. Let's give it a high level.

Devin: On the ideas at least.

Chris: Yeah. It's, you know, it's going back to saying, how do I, okay. So let's say that you're wanting to go ahead and compute a very deep and dense world of, of NPCs and interconnected story and shared history and things like that. Could be a whole lot more than. Then you can actually run on the client side and then you what you'd want to be able to do ostensibly.

This is just an example is say, let me observe how you're playing and the type of story arc that you want. Now, let me feed those particular NPCs, that particular history down into the game. So that way it is almost kind of a custom tailored or a more nuanced, , kind of storyline that the player then progresses down, which also means that if they happen to change their play style later.

All of a sudden, those engagements with different NPCs become a little bit different, right? And lay out different storylines. Now, some people are going to say, well, I don't want to always be connected to the network to be able to play a game. Sure, you don't have to be. Those can be downloaded, right? In batches overnight, those types of things, or in these incremental places.

But in order to do that, you really need to have all of that live in the cloud, because you're not going to be able to get all that compute. You're not going to be able to get all of that decision engine and everything else happening on every client. That's playing. So again, as we think about how we can leverage the massive compute that cloud offers developers, what are the types of games that we can make?

We haven't even thought of yet. That's what's so exciting, right? It feels like it always feels like we're entering a new like renaissance, right? A different era of game development because You know, the, the limits are really the only, the imagination that game developers have. And as they learn more about the systems and tools they have access to, the more we're going to help them stretch and grow their imagination.

That's why I love being here. That's, that's why I love the mission that we're on.

Devin: Well, that's, I mean, that sounds like a great point in terms of like just what you're pointing to in general, which is this idea that there's a difference between rendering a world and, you know, doing a server or a client.

There's a difference between getting player input and things like that. And then there's the. It's sort of like, how do you take procedural content to the next? So how do you take responsiveness? And obviously AI helps push that, right? Because like, there's a lot of AI, you just don't be able to run on your device.

And obviously some of that scales, some of it doesn't, but this idea that, you know, it makes me think of Minecraft, right? When you're first going to play, you have to generate the world and it's procedural. And it's going to be somewhat simplistic because it's going to run in this. You know, these older devices, things like that, but when it comes to a much more complicated world, why do you need to generate that on your device?

Why is it not something that could do far, far more and ship that down to you? Maybe, like you said, one batch, like if it was like, here's your Minecraft world, but far, far more complicated, you could process the complexity of interacting with that on your device. But you don't necessarily need to generate the whole world on your device.

Or maybe, you know, maybe you're checking in once a day to get these updates on a world that then lives dynamically in the other world and ships the updates to the world, you know, that was cloud hosting. So, I mean, there's sort of hybrid, like to what stars reaches doing this idea of like this living world, but then it's like this, this hybrid between these two, it seems like there's some interesting space in there of like.

Not everything has to live on your device and everything has to live in the cloud. There's room between the two, especially as we start shipping the different devices that may or may not have capabilities for that sorts of things.

Chris: Yeah. No, I mean, yes, I agree. Like there's opportunity across the board, you know, and we'd be remiss if we didn't also, you know, have a bit of discussion around AI and what's happening in this space right now.

Right? So it's all, it's all still very new, right? For the industry. And so, you know, the, the way I've always approached AI, right? And, and the tools and technology we have available to us is that this is about accelerating and elevating capabilities of developer, not replacing. Developer, right? It is, it is art.

It is story. It is human, right? These things, these things that we're doing. And so what I love about the approach that AWS has taken to recommending different AI tools and things like that are important. Around things like, you know, bedrock, right, which I kind of call. It's our playground for AI experimentation development and deployment, and we have more than 100 new foundation models on bedrock that may do very different things, which means that a developer can come in and start playing around with different models to see which one is more performant for a particular type of gameplay experience or component and be able to stitch those things together mid last year, and an AWS colleague named Banjo, he went ahead and took Street Fighter and he hooked it into and had eight different LLMs all play against each other to see which one performed the best. And it was an awesome, you know, experience because it was looking at single prompt, but how different models reacted differently.

So then you could start to choose. Okay, I'm going to use this model for this particular thing, and this one for that one, right? And it was really cool. I love the fact that he was Street Fighter 2, right? Which was just awesome. But when we think about AI, it's not just about, you know, automatically generating art for people or whatever, right?

Which is always, you know, a very difficult thing, because again, we're talking about Human expression, and we're also talking about, you know, the content that that can go to fill some of these models, but take a look at AI technologies that help remove, as we said at the very beginning, undifferentiated type of tasks.

So there's this company called Crikey AI, and what they do is they will take a, a video of, you know, 2D video of a dancer dancing, and then what it will do is it'll understand it's the behavior they understand joints, gravity, you know, weight, momentum, all these things, and it creates the rigging.

That goes underneath it. Now you can hand that rigging to an animator and they don't have to go back and spend that 30 percent of the time doing core rigging that they then animate from sort of like the metahuman stuff that Epic was trying to do, right? So, and the metahuman stuff, right? Then you can wrap around, right?

Those types of things. So it's not replacing an animator. It's accelerating their output by saying the undifferentiated things that you have to do that you don't like to do. We can automate some of that right as a technology as technology when I say we technology can automate that, um, and give you something to start from instead of having to go ahead and spend the time doing it.

It's about accelerating and empowering, right? Those developers. There's another company that is an AWS partner and, I got a chance to interview one of the co founders there. It's called plus music and what plus music does is. It brings in licensed music in a catalog format and then allows game developers access to those music tracks to have in their games.

But let's say you've got a cut scene that's using a particular track and the cut, the song you really want is only like. You know, a minute 90, but you need it to stretch to two minutes 30. It uses AI to stretch that music and create the bridge in between it without violating the rights of the developer.

It sounds like. It should and everybody gets to make money on the side. The artist gets paid for doing it. The developer is able to go ahead and license this at a very reasonable rate to do so. And then the consumer side of their technology allows players to craft their own playlist for a game out of the catalog that then they can not only use but also share with other players that they're playing with so they can modify those things too.

And it's using AI in a way again. That preserves the, the rights and the artistry of musicians and singers and gives access to developers, right? This incredible music and allows it to adjust to fit these different environments. That's awesome. What a wonderful way, right? To use an AI based system. That benefits everybody.

Devin: It's like this sort of automated license derivative work that that could happen in real time as opposed to something that would have to be manually processed.

Chris: And yeah, I think

Devin: That's obvious and it'd be done in real time.

Chris: Which is great.

Devin: That's what people are excited about is obviously the things that humans just can't scale up to for these sort of.

Personalized things that you can then handle with AI obviously is that is where I think, you know, cloud stuff makes some sense where we're just like, Hey, we want to do things beyond what a game client can do, but we also don't necessarily want to make it so that people have to play entirely online.

We were going to find these, these ways to do, we'll handle the compute for you on the cloud. And I remember the definitely we've seen people talking about that with cloud stuff for quite a while. I, I think I remember Xbox talking about quite a bit of that, wanting to enhance with the cloud stuff that they did to be able to then do these kinds of computes that you just really can't do on like an Xbox, you know, so you don't have to go crazy with the hardware.

Chris: Yeah, there was a, I mean, I believe it was around the original crackdown and one of the things that was discussed by the developer was, oh, you know, connect to the server side. You now have, or do you remember Drivatars was something that was used back then? Right? And it was like, oh, you know, we're using the power of the cloud.

We can really have this incredible deformation of the terrains, like buildings crumbling and stuff. But then it was like, well, what if you're not connected to the network? Oh, well, then it's going to look like this. And for the longest time, game developers, I've always said I will default to the lowest common denominator for the widest audience, right?

Because I have a finite amount of time to get my content out there, a finite amount of time to really, you know, recoup that money. And so I'll fake it to make sure I can get on as many platforms as possible, you know, get onto the platform as possible that, that people can use. And so it's not necessarily just saying, Oh, we got cloud.

So we're going to apply it and brute force this particular thing. It's, what about that massive compute on the back end is compelling to the game that you're trying to make? Do I need all of that for a match to the game? Probably not, right? So again, it all depends on the type of game or experience that you that you want to have.

And so, you know, as developers become more comfortable and learn more about how they can stretch their thinking to leverage these service that again, continue, you know, at AWS, we continue to overbuild. We continue to bring more features in there, more partners in there that can help game developers, right?

What are you going to build with this awesome, you know, toolbox guided right through guidances and Expert way of assembling these things next. And that's what we really want to do is partner with companies and help them. Like I said, build more art, more moments, meaningful connection, more smiles. That's it.

Devin: Back to that more smiles thing. Good, good way to wrap it up perfectly. A little bow there. And I'm sure we could talk about the future all day long till it actually happens. But, but of course, limited, limited time here, but I do want to thank you for coming on. It's been great. I always enjoy talking to you.

I think there's lots of cool stuff coming in the future and I hope you get to be part of it as well as it sounds like it's just as much part of the past, which is fantastic. So thank you for your work in helping preserve that stuff because it, otherwise, if no one does, it's, you know, searching for that floppy disk in someone's garage under the paint cans, trying to keep it going. So, and not all of us can do that.

Chris: Hey, look, it's, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for, for having me on your, your podcast today. I would also say again, if you want to see some of the content we talked about, we have the AWS for games channel on YouTube and Twitch. So make sure you head on over and check out all of that stuff from old retro video game shows to interviews with, you know, legend in the industry and then every week we also do a live stream on linkedin with dean takahashi from Gamesbeat mark delora and susan cummings Just we just kind of sit down and talk about games that you know the game industry news , just you know with the community. So it's a ton of fun.

So check us out over there. And, yeah, thanks. Make sure if you're going to the game developer conference next month that should come by the AWS booth. I think people are going to be Really happy to see and that won't be at the cloud. It'll be on back down on earth. Of course. Well It'll be back down on earth, but That remains to be seen what we're going to bring there.

But yeah, I’m super excited about it. Thanks so much.

Devin: Awesome. Well, again, thanks. Thanks for coming on. And thanks everyone for listening. I hope you guys enjoyed this. Definitely make sure to check out stuff. I know they have a lot of, a lot of great learning content generally on AWS from what I've seen in the past.

So if you're interested in this stuff, definitely check it out and see if there's anything you'd want to use. But in the meantime, we'll catch you guys all in the next. Episode, obviously many, many interviews always coming out and lots of great podcasts and content. If you're not already, make sure you're subscribing to the Naavik Digest, check out all the cool stuff we have in written form as well.

But, uh, in the meantime, catch you guys later. And thanks again to everyone for joining in.

Chris: Yeah. Thanks so much, Devin. Thanks everyone.

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