Edgegap and AWS GameLift both offer dedicated game server hosting orchestration.
What sets them apart?
Edgegap
Edgegap offers a modern, highly optimized, multicloud game server orchestration on the world's largest edge network (as of writing, per Edgegap's network expansion announcement) which enables multiplayer game developers to:
Ensure consistent end user experience with instant, regionless access to all of Edgegap's 615 locations worldwide (and counting) on-demand;
Deliver low latency online experience for its players with a 58% average reduction vs. public cloud per Edgegap's AAA Studio case study;
Rapid scaling with a confirmed consistent 40 deployments per second for 60 minutes reaching 14 million concurrent users ("CCU") per Edgegap's performance benchmark, with more possible over time;
High resiliency with the ability to instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers across cloud and bare metal with guaranteed 99.99% uptime.
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 all its cloud locations worldwide at a single, universal price based on 100% compute usage.
Edgegap also offers a streamlined, fully managed matchmaking system, and the option to use hybrid orchestration which optimizes bare metal and cloud usage to further minimize costs for game studios.
Edgegap prides itself on its streamlined integration process ("get your game online in minutes") including its compatibility through ready-to-use plugins, samples, and integrations with major game engines (Unity, Unreal) and tools most used by game developers (e.g., Heroic Labs Nakama, Mirror Networking, PlayFab, Photon Fusion, etc.; often endorsed by the original creators themselves), for an even more streamlined setup.
Edgegap is constantly updated, with releases every two weeks on average including new features, platform improvements and bug fixes.
AWS GameLift
AWS GameLift positions itself for multiplayer game server hosting through its dedicated server orchestration product, Amazon GameLift Servers.
Specifically for multiplayer games, AWS GameLift Servers is a traditional, managed service using fleet-based orchestration providing dedicated game server hosting and scaling capabilities.
GameLift Servers is limited to AWS infrastructure within the AWS Regions and Local Zones, which requires game developers to individually select, and pay, for every location. Per the AWS GameLift service locations documentation, GameLift Servers supports 23 regions and 10 Local Zones, for a total of 33 locations as of Q1 2026. Well short of AWS's own broader infrastructure footprint, and a fraction of Edgegap's 615+ locations worldwide.
With AWS GameLift's fleet-based orchestration, developers are required to pre-provision and maintain server fleets per region, driving costs higher during idle periods. AWS added a scale-to-zero option for fleets in January 2026, which reduces idle costs, though scaling back up from zero introduces a cold-start delay before sessions can be served. On top of that, pricing varies between regions making forecasting challenging.
AWS GameLift's integration process, while complex, remains well documented for both Unity and Unreal.
AWS GameLift advertises 99.99% uptime and includes DDoS protection at no additional charge. As of Q1 2026, an enhanced player gateway proxy, providing per-player rate limiting and IP obfuscation, is also available at no additional cost for Linux EC2 and Container Fleets on SDK v5.
AWS GameLift does not highlight any integration support communities, channels or developer support as of Q1 2026.
Important Disclaimer: Edgegap uses AWS's Infrastructure
AWS is a trusted Edgegap partner, and is part of AWS's "Partner Network". As stated by AWS itself, Edgegap's orchestration offers:
[G]ame developers instant, on-demand access to all AWS Regions and Availability Zones, for optimal latency performance and scalability.
[Which] allows game developers to instantly leverage all AWS Regions and Availability Zones (AZs) - on-demand and in one click.
Which means that through Edgegap 615+ locations, game developers have access to both AWS Regions and Availability Zones (on-demand) at a single, universal price.
If you notice any accidental discrepancies or errors, please contact us! We'll get this fixed ASAP.
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Initial Setup & Integration
Edgegap's documentation and videos highlight the orchestration platform's simple integration process and demonstrate how fast it can be achieved.
Edgegap provides an integration process for both Unity Engine and Unreal Engine. Specifically for Unity, it offers a plugin which enables developers to containerize and deploy a game server directly from Unity's editor. Edgegap's "build from container" integration process for Unreal Engine is faster than any other method, as it doesn't require developers to build Unreal Engine from Source. Both help developers containerize their game server for their project, and deploy it to Edgegap's platform in minutes.
Additionally, Edgegap provides samples alongside dedicated integration processes across major netcode transports including Mirror Networking, Unity's Netcode for Game Objects (NGO), Photon Fusion, and Fish-Networking ("FishNet"). This also includes major game services and backend tools such as Heroic Labs' Nakama, Microsoft's PlayFab, Epic Games' Epic Online Services, Pragma Engine, and Beamable.
Edgegap provides game developers with the flexibility to choose which container registry they want to use, including Edgegap's own container registry, but also external solutions such as Docker Hub, GitLab, Google Cloud's Registry, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
Once a game server is deployed, Edgegap offers a highly intuitive user experience. Every user can quickly oversee its deployment on its dashboard. For more insights, Edgegap offers an Analytics dashboard which provides details on monitoring releases with live server count per version and resource usage overview, including CPU-related and memory insights, alongside networking insights to detect inefficient networking patterns and optimize netcode performance.
AWS GameLift's initial setup is complex with multiple steps. It requires game developers to add GameLift's SDK and API into their multiplayer game, then manually configure the AWS Management Console to set up and manage server instances, fleets, and scaling policies.
In detail, it requires users to create an AWS account, set administrative access, user permissions, set programmatic access for users, and configure the game itself. Then, to integrate and build 64-bit game servers with the server SDK for Amazon GameLift Servers. AWS offers the GameLift Server SDK on GitHub.
Deploying the game server to its registry requires building the game server wrapper, preparing the game server folder, configuring the wrapper for its fleet, uploading the game build to the AWS registry, and creating managed EC2 fleets.
Container fleets for AWS GameLift reached general availability in early 2025, removing the need to build a custom game server wrapper for studios choosing the containerized path. AWS GameLift still requires manually configuring the fleet and scaling policy regardless of whether EC2 or container fleets are used.
AWS provides a plugin for Unity alongside Unreal. AWS GameLift does not provide additional integrations for netcode or game services, or samples, in its documentation.
AWS GameLift's onboarding guide to Unreal states GameLift still requires building Unreal Engine from Source, a process known for taking hours (where even community guides are available to provide tips on making it a shorter process) and is known to often fail during the process.
Products
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.
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 & 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.
Fleet Manager ("Private Fleet"): Edgegap's fleet-based orchestration for games with persistent servers such as MMOs, social, survival, etc. Providing developers with a cost-effective, fully-managed solution to manage persistent instances.
AWS GameLift offers monitoring through its "Amazon GameLift CloudWatch" solution.
Beyond its core GameLift managed hosting solution, AWS offers matchmaking through its "FlexMatch" solution, whose costs come in addition to game server hosting.
AWS solutions function within the AWS ecosystem of products, such as AWS Shield and Elastic Container Service.
AWS GameLift game servers use public IPv4 addresses and charges them to game developers. Starting February 1, 2024, AWS introduced a charge of $0.005 per public IPv4 address per hour, regardless of whether the IP is actively in-use or idle. This is free with Edgegap.
Performance (Distribution, Latency Reduction, Scalability & Resilience)
Distribution
Edgegap's modern, regionless orchestration platform is built from the ground up to provide a multi-tenant environment. Each studio can manage multiple productions within a single, geographically distributed, and highly available environment.
Edgegap prides itself on leveraging its patented orchestrator on the world's largest edge network built for multiplayer game server hosting. It includes, as of writing, 615 locations worldwide across 17+ cloud and bare metal providers who are all available to deploy game servers on-demand.
Edgegap's platform instantly distributes multiplayer games worldwide without the need for selecting regions like in traditional orchestration platforms.
AWS itself highlights that "reach [is] critical for the best player experience" for multiplayer games. Per the AWS GameLift service locations documentation, GameLift Servers supports 23 regions and 10 Local Zones, for a total of 33 locations as of Q1 2026.
What it doesn't mention is that all of these locations must be purchased individually. This is a traditional "per-region" pricing model. A global distribution is achievable but carries the cost of every individual location. This is in stark contrast to Edgegap's regionless approach, where game developers have access to all 615+ locations worldwide, on-demand.
Latency
Edgegap's platform, using its patented decision-making algorithm and the world's largest edge network, deploys game servers closest to users, enabling game developers to deliver:
A 58% average latency reduction vs. public cloud per Edgegap's AAA Studio case study;
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 ensure a 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.
AWS states that "latency [is] critical for the best player experience" for multiplayer games. AWS provides no further details on its performance to reduce latency.
Edgegap's collaboration with a AAA publisher showed that, despite having the AAA studio's large number of locations (more than what even most studios would be able to afford), by using traffic from 600,000 transactions and comparing the results with a AAA studio's current architecture, only Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 milliseconds to a drastic 48 milliseconds. As detailed in this article.
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. Thanks to its patented decision-making and rapid-scaling technology. Stacking two of such instances on Edgegap's platforms allows game developers to manage as much traffic as Fortnite had during their peak launch (100 req. per second).
This allows game developers using Edgegap's orchestration to scale and succeed at the biggest scaling challenge of orchestrators: namely meeting player demand over a short period of time such as a midnight launch, a game's addition to a subscription service, or an overnight surge in popularity.
AWS GameLift promotes its capacity to "100 million concurrent users (CCU) for a single game" achieved in a February 2025 test. However, reaching that scale requires developers to pre-provision a fleet across regions at that capacity, and to pay for every region individually, in advance of such a scenario.
As AWS itself states, realistically "the most popular games in the world today top out around 14 million CCU". This means that Edgegap's 14M CCU performance benchmark reflects the realistic production scenario. Edgegap delivers this on a regionless network, scaling game servers worldwide automatically, without requiring manual fleet capacity management or pre-purchased locations when a traffic spike occurs.
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 for the past six years, maintaining over 99.99% availability.
AWS GameLift promotes 99.99% availability, and has its years-long status page of AWS to prove the infrastructure's claim.
Platforms & Adoption
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 currently manages live games from AAA titles to indie projects alike. Current AAA games running on Edgegap include (as of Q1 2026) AAA multiplayer experiences such as the PAYDAY franchise, 7 Days to Die franchise, VR powerhouse Ghost of Tabor, massively popular The Isle, games by KRAFTON, Halfbrick Studios, Sinn Studios, AONIC and MegaBits Publishing alongside challengers such as top-10 CrazyGames multiplayer "Drift.io" by Slipstream Games and #1 MENA-region application "WOLF Qanawat". Case studies for certain of these games are available to read on Edgegap's website.
Over 1,600 studios have used Edgegap's platform (as of Q3 2025), and managed millions of players and hundreds of thousands of game servers.
AWS GameLift's orchestration solution is, like many AWS solutions, a pioneering microservice offered by AWS. It supports "all major platforms and devices, including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, mobile, web, and AR/VR headsets".
In terms of games, it promotes case studies with APEX Legends and Boss Fight Entertainment's Squid Game: Unleashed. It also highlights on its GameLift page three case studies, including Behavior's Dead by Daylight, Warhammer 40K and MARVEL SNAP whose case studies are no longer available as of Q1 2026.
Development
Edgegap, based in the region of Montréal, Canada, promotes its high-quality development and operations. Namely 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 strong and cohesive 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 does not share insights on the development of its GameLift solution.
AWS release notes are tracked publicly, and have a 1 to 2 month cadence as of writing.
Security & Support
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, disperses the malicious traffic, and even scales up resources if needed.
Amazon touts that its GameLift solution is "designed to safeguard your game servers from network and transport layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks" through its AWS Shield system, at no additional charge. As of Q1 2026, an enhanced player gateway proxy relay network is also available for Linux EC2 and Container Fleets on SDK v5, providing traffic validation, per-player rate limiting, and game server IP address obfuscation, also at no additional cost per AWS GameLift release notes.
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, or supports clients via Slack or the ability to contact its team via email.
Edgegap also provides SLA on a case-by-case basis.
AWS GameLift promotes no support channels, support communities or ability to discuss with developers (even as a paid add-on) across its website and documentation.
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. It doesn't require a credit card.
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 Q1 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. This means for game developers they can optimize their game server to, for example, 1/4 vCPU, for 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), with private hosts starting at $250/month, with only 1-month commitments.
For matchmaking, Edgegap has managed cluster tiers with clear "per-hour" pricing. Starting as low as $22 per month.
AWS GameLift uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on usage and AWS resources, using its fleet-based orchestration architecture. It offers global access within AWS infrastructure and charges for server capacity and running time. AWS also offers the ability to commit to reserved instances to generate a discount.
A fleet-based, traditional orchestration means game developers can expect 20-30% of GameLift-like orchestration capacity to be wasted, with servers held in pre-warmed pools that are not serving active players. AWS added a scale-to-zero option for fleets in January 2026, which reduces idle instance costs during periods of inactivity. Scaling back from zero, however, introduces a cold-start delay before sessions can be served, as a new instance must be provisioned on demand. Edgegap's just-in-time orchestration avoids this tradeoff entirely.
In terms of cloud compute usage, AWS's pricing is per region and broken down by instance type. Meaning, every location must be purchased from a long list of options, and that price changes according to the different locations, creating a multiplier effect for games with players worldwide. AWS reduced on-demand pricing by up to 9% across 22 regions as noted in their pricing updates; we recommend re-running the AWS GameLift pricing calculator for current estimates.
Additionally, AWS charges for egress, or "Data Transfer Out," with typical rates starting around $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB of free monthly data. Egress is usually around 25-35% of overall costs, in addition to cloud compute above.
Be aware AWS is well known for charging for additional products. In detail:
Public Address / Elastic IP: AWS GameLift game servers use public IPv4 addresses and charge $0.005 per public IPv4 address per hour, regardless of whether the IP is actively in-use or idle. This is free with Edgegap.
Load Balancing: AWS charges for Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) by the hourly rate of the load balancer plus usage-based Capacity Units. This is included with Edgegap.
FlexMatch: AWS's matchmaking includes a pricing model based on traffic, whereas Edgegap's matchmaking starts at USD $22/month flat fee.
With AWS, you may also have to use DynamoDB, CloudWatch logs & metrics, Kafka, and pay for a support plan. Most of which is included by default in your Edgegap account, including support.
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.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Edgegap | AWS GameLift | |
|---|---|---|
Focus | World's largest multi-cloud edge network, 615+ locations, optimized latency. | Traditional fleet-based hosting within the AWS ecosystem. |
Hosting | Regionless deployments nearest to players, single universal price. | AWS Regions and Local Zone. Each location must be selected and paid individually and separately. |
Regions | 615+ locations on-demand at no extra cost. | 33 GameLift-available locations as of Q1 2026 (23 regions + 10 Local Zones), each billed separately. |
Pricing Model | Transparent pay-as-you-go: $0.00115/min per vCPU. No contracts, no upfront costs, no credit card required for free account. For persistent servers, private hosts starts at $250/month, with only 1-month commitments. | Fleet charges for pre-provisioned server capacity; 20-30% wasted capacity in default configuration. Scale-to-zero available as of January 2026, though scaling back from zero introduces a cold-start delay. Hidden costs: Elastic IP, ELB, FlexMatch, CloudWatch, support plans. |
Engine Support | Native Unity/Unreal plugins, netcode samples, endorsed by Epic Games. | Unity/Unreal plugins only; no netcode samples; Unreal still requires building from Source. |
Scalability | 40 deployments/sec sustained 60 min, 14M CCU. Automatic, no pre-provisioning. | 100M CCU tested with 83,333 pre-provisioned VMs. Real-world peak ~14M CCU per AWS's own data, requiring manual fleet pre-configuration. |
Documentation & Support | 24/7 support, Discord, Slack, free dashboard -- all included. | Well-documented but no developer community, no support channel even as a paid option. |
Ease of Integration | One-click plugins, no fleet setup, video tutorials. | Multi-step: IAM config, SDK, wrapper build (or container fleet), fleet creation, scaling policies — all manual. |
Network | 58% average latency reduction vs. public cloud, benchmarked with real-world data. | States latency is "critical" but provides zero latency performance data for GameLift. |
Infrastructure | 17+ providers, automated DDoS protection, auto-rerouting, 99.99% uptime. | AWS Shield DDoS included at no charge; enhanced player gateway proxy (per-player rate limiting, IP obfuscation) available for Linux EC2 and Container Fleets on SDK v5. Single-provider; no cross-provider rerouting. 99.99% SLA. |
