Over the last 18 months, the virtual world—and specifically online gaming—has served as refuge for hundreds of millions of people globally. And no online game experience has shaped that digital landscape like Epic Games’ Fortnite—arguably the most pervasive gaming experience in human history.
As COVID lockdowns made in-person connections unavailable, people everywhere turned to immersive digital formats like Fortnite to bond with friends and family. Just a few months into the global COVID pandemic, usage numbers were already highlighting that an increasing number of people were playing Fortnite to connect with each other: in April of 2020, 350 million registered players spent a collective 3.2 billion hours in the game—nearly 100 million players more than the previous year.
Mark Imbriaco, Senior Director of Engineering at Epic Games, recalls how Fortnite became a conduit of friendship for his son and his nephew, who were separated by hundreds of miles. It was a chance to play, but also an excuse to catch up and talk. “Fortnite was kind of background music,” Imbriaco says. “When I was a kid, the background music was actual music. Now, it’s Fortnite.”
But as more people turned to Fortnite for entertainment, Epic’s needs increased for a robust, scalable infrastructure that could handle such consumption levels. Gamers are notoriously unforgiving of system downtime—after all, when your email gets glitchy, you can just step away and move onto the next task with only temporary disruption. But when a game environment goes down, that could mean millions of dissatisfied gamers; a missed opportunity to connect with friends and family.
The clip of innovation for a game with Fortnite’s size, scale, and reach is no small feat. So when Epic learned of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Graviton2 processor—a potential game-changer in terms of performance and cost-efficiency—the company’s interest was piqued. Epic was already using AWS’ cloud computing platform for its scalable infrastructure needs, but Graviton2 could change the way Epic approached its central challenge: continual innovation. Imbriaco, envisioning an increasingly connected gaming world with an increasingly creative Fortnite experience at its core, was listening.
Building a foundation
AWS’ Graviton2 was designed to simultaneously boost performance and reduce cost for companies just like Epic. But for AWS, creating Graviton2 was not just about building a powerful processor. Rather, it was about improving the customer experience and making strides towards democratizing cloud computing for a wider range of customers. AWS development teams have a long track record of challenging the status quo in service of customer needs. There’s a core ethos of, “can we improve the experience for customers?”
But game changing innovation rarely happens overnight. In building Graviton, AWS already had a successful track record in custom silicon development to work from: the AWS Nitro System, the virtualization system that paved the way for the company’s success working in custom silicon. When Graviton was formally announced back in 2018, it caught customers by surprise—AWS’ development of such a processor disrupted the technology landscape and in what kind of price performance customers could expect from a modern processor. But the original Graviton was only the first step of AWS’ processor journey. Customers benefitted heavily from Graviton, but AWS knew from the beginning there was still much that could be achieved beyond it, a whole new level of capability that could be reached with more time.
In other words, Graviton2 was always part of the development plan. When Graviton2 launched roughly a year after its predecessor, customer interest spiked even higher—achieving a second generation launch in just a year evidenced a blazingly fast clip of practical innovation. Graviton2 supported an incredibly wide variety of workloads across general purpose, compute intensive, memory intensive, and storage intensive use cases. But most importantly, it paired superior performance with a low price. Graviton2 was a game-changer in its industry—suddenly everyone was paying attention, and even potential customers with strong existing performance benchmarks started kicking the tires.
For many companies, the value was too good to pass up—Graviton2 was just so broadly applicable and so straight-forward to adopt. This didn’t happen by accident. Rather, AWS’ development team had set out for such broad applicability and ease of use from day one. A key step it took early on was to ensure that Graviton2 was supported by popular Linux operating systems and many popular applications and services from AWS and independent software vendors.
For AWS, Graviton2 is an unquestioned success. For customers, it is a game-changer for application performance and cost-efficiency. And for Epic Games, it is a key piece of how it addresses arguably its greatest challenge: continual innovation.
Empowering creation
When one says the gamer audience never sleeps, it’s meant only half metaphorically—modern gamers have a voracious 24-hour appetite for novel content and experiences. The same 24/7 hunger for innovation drives the team at Epic, as well. “Fortnite really is a moving target,” Imbriaco says. “There's no end state. There's no done. Fortnite will never be done.”
Within this sprawling vision, Graviton2 proved itself as the right tool, for the right moment. While Graviton2 has been woven into Fortnite’s game servers and voice chat capabilities, its most profound impact has been as the driver of scalability and continual innovation for Fortnite’s Creative mode—an environment that allows users to craft their own unique environments within the Fortnite experience. With Graviton2, Epic saw a cost-effective way to support Creative mode’s massive adoption and—perhaps most importantly—ensure a seamless consumer experience.
“Our goal with Graviton2 was to ensure the same immersive experience for gamers even as the growth in number of players exploded,” says Imbriaco. “Mission accomplished.”
.gif)
Since its launch at the end of 2018, Creative mode has become immensely popular—it allows users to satisfy their own continual content consumption needs. Such democratization is at Epic’s core. After all, the company also serves an entirely separate audience from actual gamers: game developers. Through another of its hallmark products, the ubiquitous Unreal engine, Epic provides a powerful animation and visualization engine for other developers to build and deploy their products on. And once again, Graviton2 is having an impact—by proving performance and cost-efficiency (at massive scale) through Fortnite, Epic then confidently rolled out support for Graviton2 to Unreal engine, extending the same benefits to its game developers. Graviton2 makes Fortnite better; Fortnite makes the Unreal engine better; the Unreal engine makes the gaming world better.
It’s a virtuous cycle. And with Graviton2’s help, Epic can continually drive its future—for gamers, developers, and—just maybe—the society at large to help people connect with each other.
“That's a big part of our focus,” Imbriaco said. “Epic is all about empowering creation.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Amazon Web Services.
