AWS GameLift's Free Bandwidth Removes the $1.6M/Month Barrier for Multiplayer Games

$1,650,791 per month — that was the egress bill for a 100,000-concurrent-user game sending 1 Mbps per client at AWS list price. Now it's zero.

Amazon GameLift Servers, as of today, 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 instances. No enrollment, no pricing agreement, no configuration change. Existing customers on eligible fleets get the benefit immediately, available in all supported regions except China.

Why This Matters for Games That Actually Move Data

Glenn Fiedler, a professional game developer building a 1000-player multiplayer space game, spells out the practical impact. His game sends 10–20 megabits per second per client — an order of magnitude more than typical titles like Apex Legends (256 kbps), Counterstrike, Valorant, or Marathon (up to 1 Mbps). At those rates, 1000 players means 10–20 Gbps of egress. Bandwidth was the most unpredictable cost component.

Fiedler's calculation: a game with 100k average CCU at 1 Mbps each would cost $1,650,791 per month at list price for outbound bandwidth. Real successful games negotiate better deals, but small indie teams? They pay list. This move democratizes access. “Small indie teams (or even tiny space games) can get access to a deal that makes AWS compute much more attractive for hosting games vs. bare metal, even at list price,” he writes.

Five Predictions for the Next Half-Decade

Fiedler lays out what he expects to change:

• Most new multiplayer games will migrate to AWS GameLift for server hosting from this point forward, because the egress charge that kept small games away is gone.
• Bare metal game server hosting companies are in real trouble — they now compete against AWS on terms much closer to their own costs.
• Google will have to match this deal or give up on the game server hosting vertical entirely.
• More multiplayer games will launch and actually become profitable.
• A totally new class of high-player-count and high-bandwidth multiplayer games will emerge.

His reasoning: if a 4K video stream can cost 25 Mbps and most of us can watch them in 2026, why can't games send 25 Mbps too? The bandwidth limitations we've been living with since the late 90s and early 2000s are a self-imposed constraint, not a technical necessity.

Fiedler thinks this might be the best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games. I'd say it's certainly the best pricing change AWS has made for game developers this decade, and the downstream effects on game design are about to become visible.

Source: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?
Domain: mas-bandwidth.com