GAMEPERF02-BP01 Select a home Region that is near your players

For an initial game launch, you should determine where to deploy infrastructure based on discussions with your business stakeholders, such as publishing teams who determine where the game is expected to be made available to players, and where they are focusing their pre-launch marketing and advertising efforts.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

Your business stakeholders should also have mechanisms to stimulate demand to gain a better understanding of player reception and viability. For example, these teams will have mechanisms such as game pre-orders, marketing events and campaigns, public email lists for players to register interest before launch, and other approaches to establish relevant signals to determine where the game will likely have the most players at launch. The game may also use a regional roll out strategy that includes play test and soft-launch phases to determine regional player demand.

Select a home Region that is near your player base and your developers and has the AWS services and features you need to host your game. The home RSegion will be where the game backend services will run, and it may also run game servers. Evaluate a home Region based on services supported, connectivity to edge locations, proximity to failover Regions, and number of Availability Zones. If you are using a Local Zone, consider the parent Region is sometimes located in a different geographic area. As an example: Santiago, Chile Local Zone us-east-1-scl-1a has N. Virginia us-east-1 as its parent Region even though it is geographically closer to Sao Paulo sa-east-1.

Implementation steps