 Everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Industry Technology Partner Showcase. This is season one episode two to kick off the series covering the exciting parts of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. Talk about enabling global collaboration and game development. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. And today we're excited to have, we're joined by Chris Lee, general manager of immersive technology at AWS and Zach Blitz, head of core technology at Epic Games. Here for the opening session of the showcase. General thanks for coming on, great to have you. Thanks for having us. A lot of action going on in game, in the news, the audience are growing, the game culture, gamification, gamers 10 years ago and now 10 years older and they're getting younger and better. It's just fun to see the game environment the way it's growing and continuing to innovate with the technology and just overall experience been great, great conversation. Let's get into the first topic. Game production in the cloud, big part of the evolution, faster time development, better experiences, it's getting bigger scales. So the first question is, what's the current state of game development in the cloud? Let's get into it. Yeah, so I think game development in the cloud right now is pretty strong. I think throughout COVID, I think the cloud really enabled game studios to go remote, enabled to be kind of spread globally. And I think about game, sorry, game development in the cloud and kind of two facets, everything that's in the game server and then everything that's outside of the game server. And I think Amazon specifically has done a lot to help with things that are kind of outside of the game server, things like a game lift have been, I think, really, really welcome additions to the industry, especially in areas where startups would have to build kind of game server management platforms on their own. And I think it's really, really awesome. Places I'd love to see us go, maybe CICD, Source Control, those things are still for small studios, I think really, really painful to get started and set up and usually it takes like two or three people working at really odd hours to get builds out and to get things tested. But yeah, so far pretty strong. Chris, obviously Amazon got the scale, Epic Games, leadership position, you guys working together, but talk about some of those trends. It's still early days in game development, certainly as the collaboration increased democratization, participation, the customer could be part of the production process themselves. All kinds of new dimensions are changing. How do you see this early days of game production? Yeah, I think Zach teed it off really well. Like the pandemic was this really transformational time for game developers, where we had to radically shift from a lot of culture around building games in the same building together to not a more hybrid workforce or fully remote workforce and then getting more distributed around the world where we've focused on how to support games that run in the cloud for a long time and live service games and orchestrating game servers and products like Game Lift. And now we're seeing game developers really want to think about how they work coming out of the post pandemic. Now that we're three years later, what does hybrid mean for us? How do we want to set up better ways to work and how could we leverage the cloud to do that? We see some definite trends there with more customers today asking about and looking for solutions from AWS, from our partners to be able to achieve better outcomes in this remote environment. Zach, you mentioned the game server and then everything kind of around it. What are some of the workflow changes you're seeing in this new environment? Yeah, I think obviously throughput is a throughput in capacity and performance in boxes are huge when you have remote build farms, when you have remote device farms, everything in the CI-CB stack and the source control stack. And so, the compute asks are only getting more intense I think for the cloud providers. And also the need to be elastic, which is not something that metal has typically provided. So, yeah. Guys, global collaboration is a big part of it. The workforce is our developers, right? They got a code, they're working together. What's changed in the makeup of the developer? And then we'll get into some of the dynamics around the game development workforce. What's the current state of the mindset or makeup of today's game developers? The same as the traditional game developers devolved, has it changed at all? What are some of the observations you've seen, Zach, and Chris around that persona? Obviously, there's more developers coming into the workforce, but what's the persona look like today? Yeah, I think games as a service has really been the big change. I think when you were shipping a box product and you kind of had like two years to ship and kind of like a 10 month sprint towards the end of that release date with a real fixed release date, crunch was really intense and you kind of got into these cycles with devs where they were just burning out pretty rapidly. I think the mindset now is a little bit more optimistic in that games as a service provide the opportunity both on the back end and the front end for us to kind of take a one step at a time approach launched with an MVP or something we feel really good about getting into players' hands and then iterating from there. Similarly, I think games today go out rather unoptimized and then kind of gradually become more optimized just as any business I think would over time. And I think the cloud definitely provides the ability for devs to do that. Chris, I want the global workforce. What are the challenges? You got all kinds. He mentioned he last Disney before. Devs are in the cloud, right? I think one trend we see is developers have always tried to push the boundaries of what's possible with the highest fidelity, find that perfect experience for gamers and achieve their creative vision. And we are seeing you have more access to a global talent pool now with this remote and hybrid work environment. And then you also see this greater demand for compute and fidelity where we have bigger data that lets you put better pixels on the screen and we have much more compute required to get that ready for game developers built and cooked into your game. So I think we do see some trends with more distributed teams than we had pre-pandemic and definitely see people leveraging these diverse pools of talent where they're located. And then just really pushing the needle of how do we help those that distributed team collaborate together while bringing the bigger data, more content, more demand for kind of generating these assets at the same time. Zach, I want to get your thoughts on the high level trends. Obviously agility has been a big part of the cloud since day one, speed, agility. Now with data and generative AI you've got a lot more generative activity whether it's at the edge, latency is now important and these games are getting more competitive. They just demand for faster turnaround times. How do you see that evolving in this global workforce? Cut distributed workforce, okay, great, check, more talent. How do they become more productive? What are some of the challenges? What's the implications? Yeah, I think if anybody thought that network engineering was dead when we moved out of the data center and didn't need to do like ACL changes anymore, I think, man, there's two, I was just thinking about what Chris said and I think there's two really important use cases there. The first is like internal WANs and network engineers who can do that stuff really well, getting builds to and from kind of build servers. I mean, that's a huge job and a really, really important job at large game studios. I think the edge in terms of gaming, yeah, I don't think you can have eSports be as prolific as it is without servers nearly everywhere. And I think Amazon's doing a great job at that. I mean, just look at Korea compared to America. I think the reason why League of Legends is so popular in places like Korea and China is just how far servers are towards the edge. I mean, playing games at two or three milliseconds is insane and it's a huge competitive advantage. I'm looking forward to kind of the last mile and a lot of the edge stuff kind of, I think growing and changing the way that we look at the types of games we can play over the next 10 years. I think if VR and especially competitive VR is going to find a place, it will be when images can be rendered directly from servers that are two milliseconds from a user's home. Obviously we're not there yet, but I'm excited about the potential for all that that brings. The high-frequency trading or high-frequency gaming, if you will, really is going to come down to also more equality in terms of the latency and competitiveness. I think that will open up a lot more environments and developers have to manage that. Chris, you guys are always working on reinvent this past year. The big discussion is about networking, interconnects, what's around the chips. This is systems architecture and it's global and that's going to have implications. Yeah, we are very excited to get the edge closer to players. We actually had work we did over the past year where we worked to help create a local zone in Dallas to really reduce latency for players in the United States to help with some of these competitive gaming scenarios. And so we're always looking at the way that our customers want to engage their player base and where they need the edge in relation to those players to make sure they have a great game experience that meets the unique needs of their games. Not every game needs that super fast latency, but when you do, you really need it. And then you have to have a great way to be able to get the cloud like a local zone for AWS where we can put compute, storage, right next to these tech centers or population hubs that people want to get into to be able to engage their players. Guys, what are some of the entrances you're seeing in the industry on the horizon? You mentioned latency, obviously, Zach, you brought that up. What are some of the challenges that are going to be solved quickly as we certainly well past the post-pandemic world now with a better, faster infrastructure coming on with cloud. Zach, what are some of the big trends you're seeing in game and game collaboration and development? Well, I think right now, the industry's had a rough go with the economic environment. And I think that has a lot to do with the lack of elasticity around fixed costs, whether that's people or compute. That's, I think that's a big deal. And you see it right now. I mean, there are a ton of startups thinking about the better ways to use spot instances to save cost. We're always thinking about better ways to kind of optimize the bottom line. And elasticity is a big deal. I don't know that that's actually super innovative, but a lot of the ways that games have scaled in the past is super inelastic. And a lot of the applications industry wide are dinosaurs in that way. And so those are things that, although maybe not the sexiest answer, like are definitely things I think we're looking at, 23 into 24 for sure. To build off that, I think the cloud and the elasticity there, de-risks launches quite a bit because before you had to come up with this upfront investment, I need to build out a bunch of infrastructure. I need to guess how many players are gonna come in the front door and win. And then if I needed to scale up, when I had this crucial moment in my game's launch, when I have the most attention on my game right up front, if you would get those guesses wrong, you can really pay at price where maybe you don't have the ability to get all those gamers into the door to try it when they're most excited to try your game experience. Or maybe you over provision a lot and you end up spending way more infrastructure up front while you're still fine tuning your game, have the right engagement with your player base. So I think this has been something that really helps game developers make sure they're getting the right amount of infrastructure at the right time and to be able to scale it quickly when they need it. I think that's one of the big advantages of working with AWS. I mean, I'm blown away by Epic scale, League of Legends, Fortnite, Zach. I mean, this is a huge scale in just in terms of the game operations and then the development. Give us an insight into the footprint, how you guys look at that, how does that work on the operating these games, whether it's exposing it to many people, but also as you manage it, you got to run this. You got to build, you got to design, test, run. You got to develop and it's the scales massive. Yeah, I think observability, single panes of glass are huge for us, both in terms of where players are, where they aren't, you know, how to be elastic in the right environments. I think like, you know, service health, all of that stuff is a huge, a huge deal. And I think, you know, not to call out like too many other programs, but like Slack does a really good job of integrating all of that stuff. I think quite well to make it so that we can run these things together seamlessly. We can do monitoring and alerting and logging. But yeah, there's a ton of information and a ton of brain power that goes into trying to figure out how to do that. And I would be doing a disservice if I gave a more specific answer than that. We have a lot of data too, the data observability. I mean, the sea of data, every single data point matters. Yeah, petabytes, petabytes. And I think like, especially applications where users, you know, you can track every single thing that users do. I think people have a tendency to want to, you know, then use that information to make conclusions and ferry it from one place to another, which gets really expensive. And I think having excellent data people manage at both of those companies, I think is really, really, really critical to both business health and operational wealth. Chris, this is really going to be a big topic. We've been talking about platform engineering. It's evolving mainstream in the enterprise. Data engineering is coming as a huge discipline. You got all this data, generative AI is on the doorstep here at the beginning stages of that trend, only going to make it better on the build run, grow side to make the experience better for users and developers at the same time. This is a huge portion of the conversation. Yeah, we're very, very excited about generative AI at AWS. We really want to help every game developer figure out how they can incorporate that into their game production. We want, I mean, one of the things we talk about is helping every company be an AI company if that's their goal to be. So we focus on a number of things there for choice in kind of choice and model and we've built great things like Amazon Bedrock where developers can choose different models that best suit their needs. We don't believe one model will rule them all. We also believe in helping game developers customize and support their models that they choose to use. We've got a way to securely make sure that you're training your models and doing those IP protections that are important to you as a game developer. And then we provide a robust set of tools for developers to use and dedicated infrastructure much like we do in the other parts of our AWS portfolio where we have chips like the Inferentia and the Tranium chips to actually lower the cost of how you deliver those things to game developers. And so I think when you think about building your game model that fits into our build model where maybe that we have dedicated solution areas for AI and ML for games. We also have things like game production in the cloud like we're talking about here today and game security, game servers. Then we get into more of the run phase where we're talking about live operations and maybe data and analytics in that growth phase to really help game developers understand what's going on in their games and what's going on with their population to make sure that they can understand the best ways to engage their players and make the best experience for them possible. Games are apps or platforms. Platforms are now global. Guys, great conversation. I have to ask you, since you're both in probably one of the most envious jobs if you love gaming, I mean, I'm a little bit too old to get back into the coding game inside of things, but for the folks that love gaming you're both in the middle of it. Zach, you're the head of core technology at Epic. What's the hottest thing going on right now? What are you most excited about? Give us a peek behind the curtain around. What's like there? Someone who's watching us may be thinking about getting into gaming or maybe entrepreneurial activities high as well on gaming. You mentioned some of the smallest news of doing well, managed services are hot. I mean, it's a lot of opportunity and people are just curious. What's the cool stuff going on and what's coming around the corner? I think it's kind of an interesting question, right? Because I don't know that there's any one thing I'm excited about. I do think that the pandemic obviously opened more people up to gaming in a way that they've never been opened up before. And that's inclusive of like, I got boomer parents who love playing the New York Times, spelling bee every day. And whether or not it's web-based or in sessions playing Battle Royale, I mean, these are all games. And I think just everybody's kind of growing acceptance of it as culture I think is really exciting. I would say if you're looking to get into the industry, this is the advice I give pretty much all the time. Most jobs that you're doing in a corporate setting carry over to games. Like we still have people who are like taking notes and meetings. We still have people who are lawyers. We still have, you know, all of these professions, you know, exist within games. And although it's kind of a boring answer, I think if you just kind of start with where you are and think about, hey, does this job actually exist in games and talk to somebody in it? Generally the answer is yes. You know, so it's, and we need all those people. It doesn't take just Zach's and Chris's to launch games. It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears from legal, from PR, from marketing, you know, a number of people in a number of different disciplines. Awesome. Chris, your thoughts on, you know, entrepreneurs out there, people who want to see peak behind the curtain, immersive technology, where are we in the progress of the ideal virtual reality, real time world? I think it's an exciting time. We see, in AWS, we always want to help empower the creatives and the developers that are bringing their vision to life. So it's exciting to see new headsets come out. We have some new headsets from Meadow with the Oculus Quest 3 and the MetaQuest 3. Sorry. And then we have, you know, the Vision Pro coming out from Apple next year. So it's exciting to see how there are so many great partners and players that are bringing to life new headsets, new experiences and new visions for what virtual reality and mixed reality can be. So I think that's an exciting time. It's very early days. We're seeing new experiences and new ways to leverage that both in gaming and across industries where we see people finding ways to collaborate or communicate differently, do training. And so there's an exciting evolution where game technologies are the technologies that people are using to bring a lot of those experiences to life. Chris, Zach, thanks so much. And Zach, congratulations on continued success at Epic. And Chris, you got the cloud growth coming, more entrepreneurs, more developers, more developer goodness, a lot more observability, a lot more data, a lot more user experiences coming with gaming across the world. Thanks so much for kicking off the Global Collaboration and Game Development series. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Thanks, John. Okay, thanks, Zach. This is theCUBE's presentation of AWS Industry Tech Partners Showcase, kicking off season one, episode two. We'll be back after the short break.