The best thing that has ever happened for multiplayer games

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Hi, I'm Glenn Fiedler, a professional game programmer with more than 25 years experience. I'm a world expert in game netcode and the author of gafferongames.com and mas-bandwidth.com.<br>Just recently on June 15th, 2026, Amazon made this announcement:<br>Starting today, Amazon GameLift Servers provides network bandwidth in and out of AWS at no additional charge for all instance types from generation 6 and later, including On-Demand and Spot, with no commitment required. You now pay only for your Amazon GameLift Servers instance hours; all network bandwidth is free.

Multiplayer game servers generate continuous network traffic to connected players, making bandwidth one of the most unpredictable cost components for game studio customers. With free network bandwidth included, Amazon GameLift Servers eliminates this cost, giving you the simplicity of bare-metal hosting with the global reach of AWS.

Free network bandwidth applies with no enrollment, pricing agreement, or configuration change required. Existing customers on eligible fleets receive the benefit immediately. It is now available in all Amazon GameLift Servers supported regions, except China.<br>Free Network Bandwidth Amazon GameLift Servers is Here! - AWS<br>Discover more about what’s new at AWS with Free Network Bandwidth Amazon GameLift Servers is Here!<br>AmazonAmazon Web Services

My first thought when reading this announcement was this article on The Onion :<br>My Advice To Anyone Starting A Business Is To Remember That Someday I Will Crush You<br>As you might imagine, I often get asked by young entrepreneurs for advice on how to start a business. What many seem to want is some sort of trick, some magic set of tools that will allow them to launch a thriving startup from scratch. Well, there’s no magic involved, but the keys to success are quite simple: Value your customers, hire well, find a market that isn’t being served, and realize that someday I will utterly crush you.<br>The OnionThe Onion Staff

Thinking the awesomeness of this announcement was self-evident, I posted this announcement to Hacker News the day it was made... and it got a single upvote.<br>It seems that outside of my specialty, multiplayer games, the absolutely massive ramifications of this announcement need a bit of explaining before people actually get it.<br>So, in this post I'm going to break this announcement down and explain why this announcement is the biggest and best thing that has happened for multiplayer games ever.<br>I will explain how this is a strategic master stroke. A move so incredibly disruptive in a good way . A move that significantly reduces risk for game developers and may even help stabilize an industry that is in total chaos right now.<br>And I make the following predictions for the next 5 years:<br>New multiplayer games will migrate to AWS GameLift for server hosting from this point forward, leaving absolute carnage in the bare metal game server hosting industry.<br>Bare metal game server hosting companies are in real trouble, being forced now to compete vs. AWS on terms that are much closer to their own costs.<br>Google will have to match this deal or give up on the game server hosting vertical entirely.<br>More multiplayer games will launch and actually become profitable.<br>A totally new class of high player count and high bandwidth multiplayer games are coming as a result of this announcement!<br>To understand all this, I have to share with you my perspective around the launches of God of War: Ascension , Titanfall 1 , Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends .<br>Going back to March 2013, God of War: Ascension launched to good but not great reviews. I think we hit a peak of 10k CCU for the multiplayer and at the time this was quite impressive for a Sony game. After this, as is so common with multiplayer games, the CCU slowly deflated post launch and no matter what we did, we couldn't fix it. It was heart wrenching to watch.<br>I had just spent 5 years of my life working on this netcode as lead network programmer, diving into absurdly complex P2P asynchronous multiplayer netcode, networking a game engine that really had no right to ever be networked, working with a team that had no experience in multiplayer, and who didn't really at their core want to make a multiplayer game (I don't blame them).<br>Leading up to launch I crunched so hard I had walking pneumonia. Post-launch I received a decent bonus combined with a lukewarm performance review "you just kinda checked out in the run up to launch" – yeah, I nearly fucking died – and started looking for other work.<br>I interviewed with Respawn , who were ramping up to the launch of Titanfall . I was quite burned out still, but figured, look this is clearly a team of experts who know how to ship a multiplayer game (they were all ex-Infinity Ward and Call of Duty , so I figured at worst this was going to be a good learning experience.<br>In the interview I said "look, you're about to launch and...