Zach Blitz, Epic Games & Chris Lee, AWS | AWS Industry Technology Partners Showcase S1E2
[Music] everyone welcome to the cubes presentation of the Ads industry technology partner showcase this is season one episode two to kick off the series covering the exciting Partners on Amazon web serice of ecosystem talk about enabling Global collaboration in game development I'm your host John fur with the cube and today we're excited to have we're joined by Chris Lee general manager of immersive technology at AWS and Zack Blitz head of core technology at epic games here for the opening session of the Showcase Gentlemen thanks for coming on great to have you thanks for having us a lot of action going on in game in in the news the audience are growing the game culture gamification Gamers 10 years ago are now 10 years older and they getting younger and better um it's just fun to see the game environment the way it's growing and continuing to innovate with the technology and the and just the overall experience been great so great great conversation let's get in the first topic game production in the cloud big part part of the evolution faster time development better experiences I it's getting bigger scale so the first question is what's the current state of game devel 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 uh I think the cloud really enabled game studios to go remote uh enabled to be kind of spread globally um and I think about game s uh sorry game vment in the cloud in 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 um to help with things that are kind of outside of the game server things like uh game lift uh have been I think really really welcome uh additions to the industry especially uh in areas where startups would have to build kind of game server management platforms on their own and I think it's it's it's really really awesome um I 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 uh and set up and usually it takes like two or three people uh working working at really odd hours to get to get builds out and to get things tested but yeah so far pretty strong Chris actually Amazon got the scale epic games leadership position you guys working together but talk about some of those Trends what 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 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 a more hybrid Workforce or fully remote Workforce and then getting more distributed around the world where um we've we've focused on how to support games that run in the cloud for a long time and live service games and uh orchestrating Game servers and products like gamelift 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 uh with more customers today asking about and looking for Solutions um from AWS from our partners to be able to 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 throughput in capacity or or and performance in in boxes are huge when you have remote uh build Farms when you have Remote device Farms um you know every everything in the cicd stack and the source control stack um and so you know these the compute asss are only getting more uh more intense I think for um for for the cloud providers um and you know also the need to be elastic which is uh not something you know uh that that metal has you know typically provided so yeah guys global is a big part of it you know the workforce is are 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 or makeup of uh today's game developers the same as the the traditional game developer has it evolved is it in changed at all what are some of the observations you've seen Zach and Chris around that Persona uh it's obv there's more developed was coming into the workforce but what's the Persona look like today yeah I think 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 you know two years to ship and kind of like a 10mon Sprint towards the end of that release date with a real fixed release date um 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 um is a little bit more optimistic in that uh 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 launch with you know an MVP or something we feel really good about getting into players hands um and then you know iterating from there uh similarly I think games today go out rather unoptimized um and then kind of gradually become more optimized just as any business I think would um over time and I think the cloud definitely provides uh the ability for for devs to do that Chris talk about the global Workforce what is the challenges you got all kinds you me he mentioned elasticity before um devs are in the cloud right uh yeah I I think uh one 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 uh more access to a global talent pool now with this remote and high HB 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 and and built and cooked into your game so I think we do see some Trends with um more distributed teams than we had pre pre pandemic and definitely uh see people leveraging these diverse pools of talent where they're located uh and then just really pushing the needle of um how do we help those that distributed team could uh collaborate together while bringing the like 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 got a lot more um generative activity whether it's at the edge um latency is now important are these games are getting more competitive they there this demand for faster turnaround times how do you see that evolving in This Global Workforce got distributed Workforce okay great check more Talent how do how do they become more productive what are some of the challenges what what's the implications yeah I I think if anybody thought that network engineering was dead uh when we moved out of the data center and didn't need to do like AAL changes anymore I think I think um man there's 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 you know internal lands and network Engineers who can do that stuff really well um getting builds to and from kind of build servers I mean that's a huge job and a really really important job at at at large game studios um I think the edge in terms of gaming yeah I don't think you can have Esports uh be as prolific as it is without servers um near everywhere and I think Amazon's doing a great job at that I me just look at Korea you know compared to to America I think the Reas 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 playing games at two and three milliseconds is insane and it's 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 um and especially competitive VR is going to find a place uh it will be when um images can be rendered directly from servers that are two milliseconds from a user's home obviously we're not there yet but I I I'm excited about you know the potential for for all that that brings the high frequency trading or or high frequency gaming if you if you will really is going to come down to also more equality in terms of latency and and and 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 was 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 I I we are very excited to get the edge closer to players we actually had uh 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 as an example to help with some of these Competitive Gaming scenarios and so we're 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 the a great game experience that meets the unique needs of their games not not every game needs that super fast latency uh but when you do you really need it and 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 um to be able to engage their players guys what are some of the trends you're seeing in the industry on the horizon mened latency obviously Zach you brought that up what are some of the challenges that that are going to be solved quickly as we certainly will past the post-pandemic world now with a with a better faster infrastructure coming on with Cloud uh Zach what are some of the big trends you're seeing uh in in gaming game collaboration and development well I think 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 you know that's you know 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 um to to save cost uh we're you know 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 anelastic um and a lot of the applications industrywide or dinosaurs uh in that way and so those are things that you know although maybe not the sexiest answer like are definitely things I think we're looking at um you know 23 into 24 for sure I to to build off that I I I think though cloud in the elasticity there Dr 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 going to come in the front door and win and then if I needed to scale up and not this crucial moment in my game's launch when you know I have the most attention on my game right up front if you get th those guesses wrong you can really pay a 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 um or 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 uh I think that's one of the the big advantages of working with um AWS I mean I'm Blown Away by epic scale you know League of Legends fortnite Zack I mean this is a huge scale just in terms of the game you know operations and then the development um give us an insight into the footprint how you guys look at that how does that work on the 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 got you got to develop and and it's the scale is massive yeah I think observability single pains the glass are are huge for us both uh in terms of where players are where they aren't you know how to be elastic in the right environments um I I think like you know service Health all of that stuff is a huge a huge deal uh and I think you know I 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 um to to make it so that we can run these things together seamlessly we can do monitoring and alerting and logging um but yeah there's a ton of information uh 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 so a lot of data too the data observability I mean a CA of data every single data point matters pabes yeah yeah pedabytes pedabytes and I think like um especially applications where users you know you can track every single thing that uh users do I think people have a tendency to want to you know then use that information to make conclusions and uh and and F it from one place to another which gets really expensive and I think having excellent data people uh manage manage uh at both of those companies I think is really really really critical um to both Business Health and operational Health 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 Eng engineering is coming as a huge discipline you got all this data generative AI 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 uh and developers at the same time this is a huge P portion of the conversation yeah we're very very excited about um generative AI at AWS we really want to help every game developer figure out how they can incorporate that into their game production um we want me one of the things we talk about is helping every company be an AI company uh if that's their goal to be U so we we focus on a number of things there for for Choice uh in kind of choice in model and we've built great things like Amazon Bedrock where developers can choose different models uh 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 um their models that they choose to use we a way to securely make sure that you're training your models and doing those those um IP protections that are important to you as a game developer and then we provide a robust set of tools for for developers to use and dedicated infrastructure much like we do in the other parts of our uh AWS portfolio where we have chips like the um uh inferentia and the tranium chips to actually lower the cost of how you deliver those things to to game developers and so I think when you think about building your game model that that fits into our build model where maybe that uh we have dedicated solution areas for AI and ml for games uh we also have things like game production in the cloud like we're talking about here today um and 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 um games and what's going 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 apps are 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 side of things but uh you know 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 if someone's 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 smaller studos are doing well manage 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 any one thing I'm excited about I I do think that the pandemic obviously opened more people up to gaming in a way that they've never been opened up before I and that's inclusive of like you know I got Boomer parents who love who love uh who love playing the New York Times you know spelling be every day and and you know whether or not it's web based or you know in sessions playing Battle Royale I mean these are all games and I think uh I think just everybody's kind of growing acceptance of it as culture I think is is really exciting I would say if you're looking to get into the industry this is the advice I give you know 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 um who are like taking notes in 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 exis in games and talk to somebody in it uh generally the answer is yes um you know so it's it's uh and we need all those people it's it doesn't take just Zach's uh and Chris's to launch games it takes a lot of a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears from from legal from PR from marketing um you know a number of people and a number of different disciplines awesome Chris your thoughts on you know entrepreneurs out there people want to see Peak behind the curtain immersive technology where are we in the in the progress of the the ideal virtual reality real time world I think it's an exciting time like we we see uh in AWS we always want to help empower the creatives and the developers that are bringing their Visions to life so it's exciting to see new headsets come out we have some new headsets from meta with the Oculus Quest 3 and or uh or The Meta Quest 3 sorry and then we have you know the Vision Pro coming out from from Apple next year so it's exciting to see how there are so many great partners and players that are bringing to life uh new headsets new experiences and New Visions for what virtual reality and mixed reality can be so I I think that's an exciting time very early days we're we're seeing um new experiences and new ways to to to to lovers at both in gaming and across Industries where we see people finding ways to collaborate or communicate differently do training and so there's uh 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 Zack thanks so much Zach congratulations on continued success at Epic and Chris you got the cloud growth coming more more entrepreneurs more developers more developer goodness a lot more observability a lot more data lot more user experiences coming uh with gaming across the world thanks so much for kicking off the global collaboration game development series appreciate you thanks for coming on thanks thanks John okay this is the q's presentation of Industry Tech partner showcase kicking off season 1 episode two we'll be back after the short break [Music]
2023-12-21 22:58
