Edgegap vs AWS Gamelift: Game Server Hosting & Orchestration comparison
Edgegap and AWS GameLift both offer dedicated game server hosting orchestration.
What sets them apart?
Comparison - At a Glance Table
Edgegap | AWS GameLift | |
|---|---|---|
Orchestration |
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Infrastructure |
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Placement |
| Game session queues select "a fleet and a fleet location based on a set of priorities that you set," including "cost, location, and player latency" |
Pricing |
| |
Scalability |
|
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Integration |
|
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Matchmaking & lobbies | Built-in managed matchmaker and server browser, from $22/month, plus third-party matchmaker integrations |
|
Support |
| |
Latency | 58% average reduction vs. public cloud (Edgegap case study) |
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Uptime | 99.99% SLA commitment; 99.999% measured over the trailing 90 days (as of October 21, 2026) | |
Track record | Product page features titles including Apex Legends, Squid Game, Dead by Daylight, Warhammer 40K: Darktide, MARVEL SNAP, and The Outlast Trials (as of November 2026) |
Comparison - Insights Summary
Edgegap
Edgegap offers a modern, highly optimized, multicloud game server orchestration on a distributed network of 615+ locations, which enables multiplayer game developers to:
Ensure consistent end user experience with instant, regionless access to Edgegap’s 615 locations worldwide (and counting) on-demand;
Edgegap’s Private Fleet provide the option to use hybrid orchestration which optimizes bare metal and cloud usage to further optimize costs for game studios while keeping end-user performance ideal.
Deliver low latency online experience for its players with a 58% average reduction vs. public cloud (Edgegap case study);
Rapid scaling with a confirmed, consistent 40 deployments per second for 60 minutes reaching 14 million concurrent users (“CCU”) in that time span. 40 deployments per second is the standard rate for each game, with higher rates available on request;
High resiliency with the ability to instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers (cloud and bare metal) with a 99.99% availability commitment.
Edgegap’s platform is accessible to anyone and can be tested with a free account which includes the essential resources to help game developers get started.
Edgegap’s approach enables game studios to deploy to its cloud locations worldwide at a single, universal price based on 100% compute usage.
Edgegap also offers an easy-to-integrate, fully managed matchmaking system.
Edgegap integrates where game developers build, starting with AI development workflows: its MCP server and agent skills let AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Codex containerize, deploy and debug game servers on Edgegap, and add matchmaking. Edgegap also offers plugins for major game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot) and integrations with the tools most used by game developers (e.g., Heroic Labs Nakama, Mirror Networking, PlayFab, Photon Fusion; often endorsed by their original creators). Edgegap’s game server SDK is optional; studios can integrate directly through Edgegap’s API.
Edgegap is constantly updated, with releases every two weeks on average including new features, platform improvements and bug fixing.
AWS Gamelift
Amazon GameLift Servers hosts game servers on managed EC2 fleets, managed container fleets, and Anywhere fleets. Managed containers became generally available on November 13, 2024, and since January 29, 2026 fleets can scale “to and from zero instances” based on game session activity.
As of November 2026, AWS’s service locations documentation lists 46 GameLift Servers locations (28 Regions and 18 Local Zones), including the 5 Regions and 8 Local Zones announced September 24, 2026. AWS’s product page and features page state “26 Regions and 9 Local Zones across 5 continents.”
AWS’s pricing page states that “Network bandwidth is free for all instance types generation 6 and later” (effective June 15, 2026), that Spot instances offer “savings of between 50% and 85% compared to On-Demand prices,” and that AWS offers “pricing discounts for large scale games” whose costs “are over $80K per month.”
AWS reports a February 2025 test of “100 million CCU, 91,000 VMs,” with a fleet “in 14 Regions,” and notes in the same post that “the most popular games in the world today top out around 14 million CCU.”
AWS advertises “99.99% availability”. Since August 25, 2026, Enhanced DDoS Protection is active “with nothing to enable or opt in to” for fleets on Server SDK 5, alongside the opt-in player gateway available since March 4, 2026 in 7 Regions.
AWS offers matchmaking through FlexMatch, priced separately from game server hosting.
Methodology
This comparison uses only information published by each company on its own website, documentation, and pricing pages, linked inline. Where a figure is Edgegap's own measurement, it is labeled as such.
Comparison - Deep Dive
Initial Setup & Integration
Edgegap
Edgegap is built to be integrated from an AI development workflow. Its MCP server and agent skills let AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Codex containerize a game server, deploy and debug it on Edgegap, and add matchmaking (MCP documentation). For developers who prefer to integrate by hand, Edgegap's documentation and videos cover each step.
Edgegap provides integration processes for Unity Engine, Unreal Engine, and Godot Engine. For Unity and Godot, it offers a dedicated servers quickstart plugin (Unity, Godot) that containerizes and deploys a game server directly from the editor. Edgegap's "build from container" integration process for Unreal Engine does not require building Unreal Engine from source, the typical dedicated game server integration process for this engine.
Edgegap's integrations page lists samples and integration guides across major netcodes, including Mirror Networking, Unity's Netcode for GameObjects (NGO), Photon Fusion, Fish-Networking ("FishNet"), PurrNet and netfox, and game services and backends such as Heroic Labs' Nakama, Microsoft's PlayFab, Epic Games' Epic Online Services, Unity Gaming Services (UGS) Matchmaking, Colyseus, Steam Lobbies, Pragma Engine, and Beamable.
Edgegap lets game developers choose their container registry, including Edgegap's own container registry and external solutions such as Docker Hub, GitLab, Google Cloud's Registry, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
Once a game server is deployed, every user can oversee its deployments on the dashboard. Edgegap's Analytics dashboard shows live server count per version, CPU and memory usage, and networking insights to detect inefficient networking patterns and optimize netcode performance.
AWS Gamelift
AWS's setup guide for Amazon GameLift Servers lists four steps: "Sign up for an AWS account," "Set user permissions for Amazon GameLift Servers," "Set up programmatic access for users," and "Set up programmatic access for your game." AWS publishes its server SDKs and plugins on GitHub.
For managed EC2 fleets, AWS's game server wrapper tutorial lists eight steps: "Get and build the game server wrapper," "Prepare your game server build," "Configure the wrapper for your fleet," "Upload the game server build," "Create the managed EC2 fleet," "Create and connect to a game session," "Manage and monitor your fleet," and "Scale your game servers." On November 13, 2024, AWS announced that "Amazon GameLift now supports containers for building, deploying, and running game server packages."
AWS provides plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine. The Unity plugin "adds the Amazon GameLift Servers C# server SDK and tools to the Unity editor," and the Unreal plugin "adds the Amazon GameLift Servers C++ server SDK and tools to the UE editor." AWS's product page adds that "SDKs are available for O3DE and custom engines."
To package a game server with the Unreal plugin, AWS's integration guide instructs: "Open your game project in a source-built version of the Unreal Engine editor." AWS's June 2025 blog post on the Unreal Engine 5 integration states: "You need a source-built editor to package a multiplayer game server build."
For its DDoS protection features, AWS provides sample code for "Unreal Engine and native C++" (March 2026), and client SDKs for C# and Unity that "integrate game clients with player gateway and UDP ping beacons" (release notes, as of November 2026). Since October 22, 2026, the plugin for Unity "uses UDP ping beacons to measure latency to Amazon GameLift Servers hosting locations."
Products
Edgegap
Beyond dedicated game servers, Edgegap offers a range of solutions to help multiplayer game developers, including:
Matchmaking: Group players easily and launch games instantly. A fully managed, infinitely customizable matchmaking system to optimally group players worldwide.
Server Browser: A lobby-like system that lets players discover, browse, and join available game servers directly.
Extensible Relays: A relay running on a dedicated server, such as LightNet, that can be extended with game logic into a multi-room server. It hides player IP addresses, avoids most NAT issues, and keeps the route, locations and code under the studio's control (guide to game server types).
Managed Clusters: Managed Clusters make hosting self-managed game services and game backend easy and fast.
Managed Infrastructure: Easily and cost-effectively run all backend services in Edgegap's fully managed clusters including managed Kubernetes, managed databases and storage, and real-time CDN.
Container Registry: Edgegap's registry includes 10 GB, with external registry integration available.
Analytics: Generate insights to optimize your game server, usage and orchestration experience.
Private, Always Online Deployments: Learn how to enable persistent worlds with 24/7 always online deployments. Ideal for multiplayer experiences such as social games and MMOs.
China Deployments: Leverage the same platform worldwide. Availability is pending regulatory, country-specific compliance in this market.
Hybrid Orchestration (Bare Metal + Cloud): For committed studios with predictable traffic, leverage Bare Metal for low tide traffic to optimize costs, and seamlessly scale with Cloud for traffic spikes.
Fleets: Edgegap's Fleets enable game developers to both 1. add persistent servers without Egress that help developers optimize costs at each of the selection locations and 2. add 24/7 persistent servers which are useful games as MMOs, social, survival, etc.
Edgegap offers a fully managed matchmaking system as part of its platform, alongside compatibility with matchmaking services, including UGS Matchmaking.
AWS Gamelift
Beyond game server hosting, AWS documents the following GameLift Servers capabilities (as of November 2026):
FlexMatch: "Use Amazon GameLift Servers FlexMatch to add player matchmaking functionality to your Amazon GameLift Servers hosted games." AWS's features page states it can match "up to 200 players into a single game session."
Game session queues and FleetIQ: "A game session queue is the primary mechanism that Amazon GameLift Servers uses to search for available game servers and choose them to host new game sessions."
Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch: "an AWS service that collects raw data and processes it into readable, near real-time metrics. These statistics are kept for 15 months."
Anywhere fleets: AWS's features page states developers can "Register your local development environment with Amazon GameLift Servers."
DDoS protection: the player gateway and Enhanced DDoS Protection, described under Security below.
Performance (Distribution, Latency Reduction, Scalability & Resilience)
Distribution
Edgegap
Distribution
Edgegap's modern, regionless orchestration platform is built from the ground up to provide a fully gated multi-tenant environment. Multiple studios can run on the same server, but each deployment is gapped in its own isolated container that cannot exceed its requested resources, so no container's usage can overlap another's on a shared server and no noisy-neighbor effect is possible. Resources are reserved per deployment, with Edgegap billing per dedicated vCPU, fractionable down to 1/4 vCPU.
This co-tenancy is an advantage. Private, traditional fleets carry wasted capacity because not every server is fully used at the same time: basic factors like location and time of day leave capacity idle, and the onus of optimizing that usage falls on each individual studio. With Edgegap's on-demand Edge Cloud, that wasted capacity and the per-location optimization workload are removed entirely. For studios that still want fleets for their specific benefits, such as persistent servers or egress-free hosting, hybrid orchestration offers the best of both, and Edgegap automatically optimizes across on-demand and fleet capacity.
Edgegap prides itself on leveraging its patented orchestrator on a distributed network built for multiplayer game server hosting. It includes, as of Q1 2026, 615 locations worldwide across 17+ cloud and bare metal providers, available to deploy game servers on-demand.
Edgegap's platform instantly distributes multiplayer games worldwide without the need to select regions as required in traditional orchestration platforms.
Edgegap also offers Fleets, available across 58 sites (as of July 2026), which let studios run persistent, always-online servers and egress-less servers, either standalone or combined with cloud through hybrid orchestration.
AWS Gamelift
As of November 2026, AWS's service locations documentation lists 28 Regions and 18 Local Zones for Amazon GameLift Servers, for a total of 46 locations. This includes the locations AWS announced on September 24, 2026 ("5 new AWS Regions and 8 AWS Local Zones worldwide"): Regions in Tel Aviv, Mexico, Spain, Hyderabad, and Jakarta, and Local Zones in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Lima. Per the same documentation, 14 of the 28 Regions can serve as a home Region for managed fleets; the other 14 Regions and all 18 Local Zones are listed as remote locations for multi-location fleets.
AWS's pages state different totals: the product page and features page state "Deploy game servers around the world on reliable AWS infrastructure in 26 Regions and 9 Local Zones across 5 continents," and the pricing page states "68 instance families across 26 regions and 9 Local Zones," while the service locations documentation lists 28 Regions and 18 Local Zones (as of November 2026).
AWS's game session queue documentation states: "Each fleet can have hosting resources deployed in multiple geographic locations. When choosing a placement, the queue selects a fleet and a fleet location based on a set of priorities that you set for the fleet."
Latency
Edgegap
Latency
Edgegap's platform, using its patented decision-making algorithm and its network of 615+ locations, deploys game servers closest to users. This enables game developers to deliver:
Reduction of players' latency by "58% on average vs. public cloud";
"78% sub-50 milliseconds (i.e., 'real time') latency vs. 14% for public cloud," alongside "91% sub-100 ms latency (i.e. 'sweet spot' for non-eSports multiplayer) vs. 67% for public cloud."
Critically, this ensures a "95% improvement of players' experience" worldwide, which helps game developers maintain consistent end-user experience including traditionally challenging markets such as Oceania and Asia.
Additionally, it helps game developers avoid static, region-locked matchmaking, which helps increase match quality for players.
In Edgegap's collaboration with a AAA publisher, using traffic from 600,000 transactions, average latency fell from 116 milliseconds to 48 milliseconds (Edgegap case study).
AWS Gamelift
AWS's product page states: "Be closer to where your players are and bring them low latency gaming experiences." Its game session queue documentation states that queues use the FleetIQ algorithm "to prioritize placements based on a set of defined preferences, including cost, location, and player latency," and that "Location is important if you're making placements based on reported player latency." As of Q4 2026, the GameLift Servers product page publishes no latency measurements.
Scalability
Edgegap
Scalability
Edgegap's performance benchmark proves its orchestration can consistently scale at 40 deployments per second, sustained for 60 minutes, for a total of 14 million concurrent users (“CCU”) of players worldwide. Per Edgegap's platform data, 40 deployments per second is the standard rate for each game from confirmed studios with live traffic, and higher rates are available on request. In a load test ahead of a client's launch (October 2026), deployments peaked at 70 per second, and 99.946% of the 94,995 deployments requested succeeded. Thanks to its patented decision-making and rapid-scaling technology. Stacking two of such instances on Edgegap's platforms allow game developers to manage as much traffic as Fortnite had during their peak launch (100 req. per seconds).
This allows game developers using Edgegap's orchestration to scale and ensure to succeed the biggest scaling challenge of orchestrators; namely meeting player's demand over a short period of time such as a midnight launch, a game's addition to a subscription service, or a “streaming sensation” overnight popularity.
As of November 2026, Edgegap has orchestrated 140M LTD deployments since February 2019, a count that includes deployments that failed to start, the same basis competitors use.
Edgegap's median server deployment time is 2 seconds from cold start, provisioned from scratch rather than allocated onto an already-running server and measured to container ready (Edgegap platform data, as of September 2026).
AWS Gamelift
AWS's February 2025 blog post reports a test of "100 million CCU, 91,000 VMs, and over 2,700 games for each second." Per the post, the test fleet was "set up in 14 Regions around the globe," with "1,400 as the minimum and desired number of VMs for each Region," allowing "demand-based autoscaling up to 91,000 VMs." The same post states that "the most popular games in the world today top out around 14 million CCU."
On January 29, 2026, AWS announced that "Amazon GameLift Servers now supports automatic scaling to and from zero instances," noting: "Previously, developers had to maintain running instances even during periods of low or no activity in order for Fleet autoscaling to remain active." As of Q4 2026, AWS does not publish a median game session start time for GameLift Servers on its product, features, or pricing pages.
Resilience
Edgegap
Resilience
Edgegap's vast network telemetry allows it to detect issues with sites or providers, such as outages, and instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers across cloud and bare metal.
Edgegap's platform has been running live 24/7 since February 2019, with a 99.99% availability commitment and 99.999% measured uptime over the trailing 90 days (as of October 21, 2026).
AWS Gamelift
AWS's product page advertises "99.99% availability." AWS Basic Support includes AWS Health: "A personalized view of the health of AWS services, and alerts when your resources are impacted." AWS's DDoS protection documentation states that the player gateway provides "updated endpoints when relay endpoints become unhealthy."
Platforms & Adoption
Edgegap
Edgegap's dedicated game server and various integrations ensure the platform supports all game hardware types, such as PC, consoles (PlayStation, XBOX, Nintendo Switch), VR, mobile, web-based (HTML5, WebGL, etc.) alongside new devices such as extended reality ("XR") devices including Apple's Vision headsets, and META's AI glasses such as Ray-Ban Meta and Meta Ray-Ban Display.
Edgegap is part of Nintendo's Switch developer portal alongside PlayStation's Partner Program.
Edgegap is the sole orchestrator endorsed by Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine, through its Epic Online Services.
In terms of games, Edgegap supports titles from AAA to indie projects alike. Games that have run on Edgegap in 2026 include two mobile publishers among the top 10 by downloads and revenue, PAYDAY 3, the 7 Days to Die franchise, The Isle (a top-100 title by concurrent players on Steam in May 2026), Loftia (Qloud Games' cozy MMO), 1047 Games, a KRAFTON title, Halfbrick Studios, Sinn Studios, and MegaBits Publishing, alongside challengers such as top-10 CrazyGames multiplayer "Drift.io" by Slipstream Games and the #1 MENA-region application "WOLF Qanawat." Case studies for certain of these games are available to read.
AWS Gamelift
AWS's product page states that GameLift Servers "Supports all major platforms and devices, including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, mobile, web, and AR/VR headsets."
As of November 2026, the GameLift Servers product page features titles including Apex Legends ("migrates to Amazon GameLift Servers in just 10 days"), Squid Game, Dead by Daylight, Warhammer 40K: Darktide, MARVEL SNAP, and The Outlast Trials. The same page states that GameLift Servers integrates with "popular game backends such as Pragma, Heroic Labs/Nakama, and AccelByte."
Development
Edgegap
Edgegap, based in the region of Montréal, Canada, promotes its high-quality development and operations. Its product, development, and operations teams employ robust processes, including roadmap strategy, agile methodology, QA, and strict code reviews. Its CI/CD pipeline spans development, staging, and production environments, resulting in a high-quality platform with strong availability. The orchestrator's production is entirely in-house from Edgegap's office in the region of Montréal by a cohesive engineering team.
Edgegap consistently releases updates through sprints, maintaining a cadence of a release every two weeks on average, introducing new features, improvements, and bug fixes each time. All listed in its release notes.
AWS Gamelift
AWS publishes release notes for Amazon GameLift Servers and announces features through its What's New feed. GameLift Servers announcements in 2026 include scaling to and from zero (January 29), player gateway DDoS protection (March 4), free network bandwidth on generation 6 and later instances (effective June 15), Enhanced DDoS Protection (August 25), the region expansion (September 24), CPU bursting for container fleets (October 8), and .NET 10 support in the C# server SDK (October 22). As of November 2026, the release notes list version 3.4.1 of the plugin for Unreal and version 3.3.2 of the plugin for Unity (October 22, 2026); Unreal Engine 5.8 support was added on August 4, 2026.
Security & Support
Security
Edgegap
Security
Edgegap advertises its automated protection against hackers with instant DDoS attack protection.
Whenever Edgegap detects abnormal traffic patterns indicative of DDoS attacks in real time, the platform automatically redirects traffic away from the targeted server, disperse the malicious traffic, and even scale up resources if needed.
AWS Gamelift
AWS's product page lists "Proactive, UDP-based DDoS protection for game servers."
Since March 4, 2026, AWS has offered the player gateway, a relay that "authenticates client traffic using access tokens so that only authorized traffic reaches the server" and "enforces per-player traffic limits," at "no additional cost." AWS's documentation states: "You must enable player gateway during fleet creation and update your game client and game backend to use this feature," and "Player gateway requires game servers to run on Linux-based Amazon GameLift Servers Managed EC2 fleets or Container Fleets." As of November 2026, the service locations documentation lists 7 valid fleet home Regions for the player gateway: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Seoul).
On August 25, 2026, AWS announced Enhanced DDoS Protection, which addresses "common volumetric attacks at layers 3 and 4 including UDP reflection, SYN floods." Per the announcement, it "is active from the moment you start running game servers on Amazon GameLift Servers, with nothing to enable or opt in to," applies to fleets using "Amazon GameLift Servers Server SDK 5 (SDKv5)," and is "available at no additional cost." Regional availability is listed in the announcement.
Support
Edgegap
Support
Edgegap's client support is free and includes 24/7 on-call engineers for games with live traffic. It has a client support dashboard.
For integration support, or ongoing conversations with clients, Edgegap has a public Discord server, and supports clients via Slack or the ability to contact the team via email.
Edgegap also provides SLAs on a case-by-case basis.
AWS Gamelift
AWS Basic Support, "included for all AWS customers," provides "24/7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and AWS re:Post." AWS's paid support plans are Business Support+, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations (AWS Support plans, as of November 2026).
Price
What it costs in practice
Two example games, priced with our public calculator using the inputs below. These are estimates, and your costs depend on your own game.
Modelled
Shooter, 5,000 peak CCU
$4,535
per month
$0.91 per peak CCU
~60%
below AWS Gamelift
which models at $11,417 per month,
or $2.28 per peak CCU,
against its list pricing as of November 2026.
Peak CCU
5,000
Low-tide CCU
614
Players per match
8
vCPU per instance
1
Egress per player
7 KB/s
Bare-metal ratio
55%
Private Fleet commitment term
12 months
Calculator run of 3 November 2026
Modelled
TCG, 10,000 peak CCU
$6,905
per month
$0.69 per peak CCU
~64%
below AWS Gamelift
which models at $19,098 per month,
or $1.91 per peak CCU,
against its list pricing as of November 2026.
Peak CCU
10,000
Low-tide CCU
1,535
Players per match
2
vCPU per instance
0.125
Egress per player
1 KB/s
Bare-metal ratio
55%
Private Fleet commitment term
12 months
Calculator run of 3 November 2026
How the AWS GameLift figures were modelled. GameLift Gen6 fleets on c6i.4xlarge instances (16 vCPU), billed per full instance while active, with network bandwidth included on Gen6 instances. One fleet per region, scaled to hourly demand. Shooter: 6 regions (US East, Europe West, Asia Pacific, US West, Europe Central, Middle East), 14 sessions per instance, 31 instances at peak, about 77% average utilization. TCG: 8 regions (adds South America and Oceania), 112 sessions per instance, 50 instances at peak, about 80% average utilization. Instance cold starts are not modelled, which favours AWS.
Your bill varies per rate and usage, which can vary per game type, player count and more.
Model your usage with our estimate calculator →
Pricing Calculator
Edgegap
Edgegap provides access to its platform with a free account. This includes a free trial with the essential resources to help game developers get started. No credit card is required.
Edgegap has a clear, transparent pricing for its game server orchestration that is solely based on usage. Namely, $0.00115/min per dedicated vCPU (which is fractionable) and $0.10/GB of monthly network egress as of Q4 2026. Edgegap's pricing is 100% for compute, unlike traditional orchestration which has wasted capacity.
Edgegap allows for vCPU fractioning, down to 1/4 vCPU. For game developers, optimizing their game server to 1/4 vCPU results in a final price of 25% * $0.00115 = $0.0002875/min.
Edgegap does not require a commitment, nor has upfront costs, nor does it require engineering support.
Edgegap offers hybrid orchestration (bare metal + cloud) through its Private Fleets, with two self-serve specifications: the Performance host at $280/month (16 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, up to 3.7 GHz, 6 TB egress included per host) and the Overdrive host at $320/month (up to 5.1 GHz, 64 GB RAM) for CPU-intensive games, both on a 12-month commitment as of Q4 2026. Each host provides 14.7 of its 16 vCPU as usable capacity, or $0.0261 per vCPU per hour at the 12-month rate. Shorter terms are available at higher rates, per Edgegap's Private Fleets documentation: Performance is $323.75/month (6-month) or $350/month (month-to-month), and Overdrive is $370/month (6-month) or $400/month (month-to-month).
To estimate costs for a specific game, studios can use Edgegap's pricing calculator and review the published figures and methodology on Edgegap's platform data page.
Studios with established usage patterns that are looking to migrate to Edgegap are encouraged to contact us for a custom estimate based on their actual, historical deployment patterns.
For matchmaking, Edgegap has managed cluster tiers with clear "per-hour" pricing. Starting as low as $22 per month.
AWS Gamelift
As of Q4 2026, AWS's instance pricing page states: "With Amazon GameLift Servers, you only pay for your usage of the service. Amazon GameLift Servers charge for instances by duration of use, and network bandwidth is free for eligible instance types." Instance rates are listed by instance type, operating system, and location, for On-Demand and Spot.
AWS's pricing page states:
AWS's features page states Spot savings "up to 70%" and Graviton "savings of up to 20% versus comparable x86-based Amazon EC2 instances." The two AWS pages state different Spot savings figures (as of November 2026).
Per AWS's free network bandwidth announcement: "Starting June 15, 2026, network bandwidth is now included at no additional charge" for instances of "generation 6 or newer (c6, m6, c7, m7 etc. instance families)," "across all Regions (excluding China), all Local Zones." For studios on older generations, AWS states "it's as simple as creating new Fleets with gen6+ instances to start capturing the free network bandwidth savings."
AWS's pricing page publishes four worked examples, with total costs of $111,566.81 ("5v5 competitive shooter," 50,000 peak CCU), $37,188.94 ("1v1 Fighting," 10,000 peak CCU), $3,237.09 ("1v1 Card game," 10,000 peak CCU), and $165,217.25 ("100 Player Battle Royale," 100,000 peak CCU). The same page links the AWS Free Tier: "Begin your journey with a free account and resources, with the AWS Free Tier."
FlexMatch is priced separately: "The monthly Player Packages price is $20 per 1 million Player Packages, and the free tier provides 50,000 Player Packages per month," and "The monthly Matchmaking Hours price is $1 per Matchmaking Hour and the free tier provides 5 Matchmaking Hours" (FlexMatch pricing, as of October 2026).
Effective September 26, 2024, AWS reduced GameLift on-demand prices by 0.01% to 9.10% across 22 AWS Regions.
Migrating from AWS Gamelift to Edgegap
If you are looking to migrate your multiplayer game from AWS GameLift to Edgegap's game server hosting & orchestration, the following simple steps will get you running in no time.
Make sure to refer to our "Switching from GameLift to Edgegap" documentation for the latest updates to this process.
Before getting started, we expect that:
You currently use AWS GameLift
You currently have a working game server build on GameLift
Step 1: Remove AWS GameLift SDK
The first step to switch to Edgegap is to remove the code that initializes AWS GameLift within your game server. This is to reduce overhead and prevent errors. The code you are looking to remove probably looks like the following (see links).
Unity (C#): Link to code
Unreal Engine (C++): Link to code
Step 2: Containerize your game server
The second step towards switching to Edgegap is to containerize your game server. You can follow the following guides for each engine, which takes around 5-20 minutes for projects in development.
Unity: Documentation, tutorial video
Unreal Engine: Documentation, tutorial video
Step 3: Identify & Replace features
Review and identify services and features you currently use in AWS GameLift, to be replaced with:
AWS Gamelift - Feature | Edgegap - Feature |
|---|---|
Authentication | Optionally, add fine-grained access controls: |
Hosting SDK (Unity, Unreal Engine) | No SDK required! ServerConfig replaced by Apps and Versions. |
Create a Build | Try our quickstart tools - Unity / Unreal Engine. |
Build Configuration | Fully Automated. Optionally expose additional ports or variables. |
Fleet | Private Fleets with Persistence and Cloud Overflow. Optionally add later on, or default to Match-Bound cloud. |
Lobby | |
Matchmaking | No-code matchmaker, test for free, integrate with lightweight SDKs. |
A/B testing | Configurable Profiles (Queues) and Rolling Updates. |
Server Analytics |
Step 4: (Optional) Setting up Fleets
Edgegap also offers an optional feature similar to AWS GameLift's fleets, if that is something from before you switched to Edgegap that you would like to keep using. Discover our Fleet Manager for persistent servers. Edgegap's 615+ locations also include AWS Regions and Availability Zones (Edgegap and AWS), so studios moving from GameLift can keep deploying to AWS infrastructure alongside Edgegap's other providers.
