AWS touts cloud server capabilities ahead of Games on AWS conference

Kang Hwan-bin, head of gaming in the Korea game tech team at AWS, speaks during a press conference held Monday at Coex in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. [AWS KOREA]

For gaming companies, having a cloud server is no longer an option, but a must.

“In the local game industry, AWS has become the new normal, with all of the top 15 companies using the AWS cloud service,” said Kang Hwan-bin, the head of gaming in the Korea game tech team at AWS, during a press conference held Monday at Coex in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, ahead of the annual Games on AWS event Tuesday.

Games on AWS, which is in its eighth year, is a conference for gaming companies. Game publishers and developers including Nexon, Devsisters, Wemade Play, Kakao Games and Krafton took part in this year’s event.

Hong Sung-jin, chief technology officer of Devsisters, and Ryu Chung-hoon, head of the technology division at Nexon Korea, attended the press event Monday as well.

"The goal of our company was simple: success of the game," said Devsisters’ Hong, recalling the early days of the now-global game company during the press event.

Devsisters is a game developer known for its Cookie Run game. Since its launch in 2013, Cookie Run has accumulated over 200 million users both from home and abroad, as of September this year.

"With such a goal, I had to operate the server by myself back then,” said Hong. “Under those circumstances, adopting a cloud server was not an option, but a must.”

Hong explained that the AWS cloud infrastructure enabled Devsisters to automatically scale up or down the cloud server according to the traffic volume.

“With the AWS cloud, we could make bold challenges that only companies with huge resources could have made, with such limited resources,” said Hong.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]