Jackbox Games Expands Horizons with Amazon’s GameLift Technology for PC and Television Integration
By Amazon’s GameLift service now incorporates streaming functionalities that enable developers and publishers to “create and deliver global, direct-to-player game streaming experiences.”
These streams will allow them to launch video games without relying on any platform with a web browser, alongside PCs, smartphones, and SmartTVs. As Amazon highlights, this means businesses “[avoid] pouring millions of dollars into infrastructure and software development to build their own services. Players can dive into gaming in mere seconds, without waiting for downloads or installations.”
Party game developer Jackbox is the first supporter of GameLift Streams, and CTO Evan Jacover praised how the technology seamlessly integrated with its games. “Based on our discussions with other streaming platforms, we expected to have to do a custom build, but we didn’t need to,” he stated. “We simply took our Windows build, uploaded it to Amazon GameLift Streams, and it worked perfectly. The entire process was smooth, and the game appeared and sounded fantastic.”
Jackbox’s game collection has expanded sufficiently to necessitate a unified launcher, and Jacover noted that scaling for each individual title would require “a substantial amount of overhead.” GameLift Streams enables the developer to scale “for our entire catalog, which enhances overall efficiency. Keeping expenses low is crucial to making streaming viable from a business perspective, so these efficiencies accumulate significantly.”
To further showcase GameLift Streams’ capabilities, Jackbox introduced a SmartTV app. Longtime gamers can access their library through the app in a “more refined and user-friendly manner,” and newcomers without a console enjoy a simpler way to explore the developer’s creations.
According to Amazon’s blog, the GameLift Streams SDK integrates with a game’s existing services, storefronts, and launchers to facilitate streaming. Developers can leverage the SDK console to monitor live streams and scale infrastructure across multiple regions within the Amazon Web Services network. “GameLift Streams is the sole solution that allows you to upload your game content onto fully-managed GPU instances in the cloud and commence streaming in minutes,” it states, “with minimal or no changes to your code.”