The gaming industry has faced a tough year, and the road ahead remains uncertain. At DICE this year, the sentiment shifted from "survive to ‘25" to simply "survive ‘25." Many industry executives are hyper-focused on reducing costs—downsizing teams, cutting expansion plans, and scrutinizing operational expenses.
One of the stickiest challenges? Cloud infrastructure costs. Despite multiple cost-cutting efforts, cloud spend continues to be a major financial burden. The reason is clear: cloud markups are exceptionally high (AWS generated $40 billion in operating income last year). Multiplayer games are hit particularly hard, since bandwidth-heavy operations incur massive egress fees.
The Cost-Saving Imperative
To stay competitive, studios must take control of their cloud expenses. At Hathora, we've helped several studios transition from AWS GameLift to our hybrid cloud solution, delivering significant cost reductions, smoother developer workflows, and an improved player experience. Here’s how:
Unlocking 50-70% Cost Savings with Hathora
Compared to GameLift, our customers achieve dramatic cost reductions through a combination of optimized infrastructure and smarter deployment strategies:
- Lower Compute and Bandwidth Costs with Bare Metal – Right from the start, our egress bandwidth pricing is 90% cheaper than AWS. Additionally, our 4th-gen AMD EPYC servers offer nearly 40% savings compared to the equivalent `c7a.16xlarge` instances on AWS.
- Flexible Commitment Terms – Unlike cloud providers that require 1-3 year commitments, Hathora offers month-to-month terms with optional 3- and 12-month commitments for further discounts. This flexibility is critical in today’s volatile industry and is a feature of our product, not a sales gimmick.
- Unified Compute Pools for All Game Modes – AWS GameLift pushes studios to maintain separate compute pools for different game modes and environments (dev, QA, staging, production). This leads to significant underutilization. Hathora’s dynamic scheduling system enables workloads to share compute resources, reducing waste and maximizing efficiency.
- Faster, More Responsive Autoscaling – Hathora’s autoscaler reacts to demand shifts within 15 seconds, with new capacity coming online in under 3 minutes. Compare this to GameLift, where studios report long spin-up times, requiring them to keep autoscaling thresholds at 50% utilization—another costly inefficiency.
It's easy to see how 40%+ lower unit costs combined with the other optimizations have led studios to see almost 70% lower costs running on Hathora over GameLift.
Developer Experience: Faster, Smoother, Better
Studios that migrate from GameLift to Hathora consistently report a vastly improved developer experience. One customer even joked that their team started calling us Hallelujah instead of Hathora—because of how seamless the experience felt.
Hathora is designed with developer efficiency in mind:
- Rapid Iteration Cycles – Deployments are fast, reducing wait times and improving workflow, allowing developers to iterate quickly and efficiently.
- Instant Startup – Game servers boot up in seconds, eliminating unnecessary downtime and keeping teams productive.
- Real-Time Metrics and Logs – Gain immediate visibility into performance with instant access to logs and analytics, enabling faster debugging and issue resolution.
- Simple Development-to-Production Path – Streamline the transition from development to production with intuitive automation and validation.
- Local Validation – Containers can be run locally before deployment, ensuring consistency and reliability.
- Automated Uploads – Deployments to Hathora can be easily automated via our CLI, reducing manual effort. No AMIs to manage!
- One-Click Promotions – Seamlessly promote an existing build to production with a single click, simplifying release management.
- Ultimate Control Over Infrastructure – Gain deep customization capabilities to tailor infrastructure to your needs.
- Custom Configurations – Modify OS-level settings in your Dockerfile and optimize performance for your specific use case.
- Sidecar Integrations – Easily integrate custom sidecars to enhance server functionality.
- Direct Access – Access containers via SSH or remote debugging for precise control and troubleshooting.
From launching new builds to scaling up in new regions, every aspect of Hathora is designed to streamline operations and empower developers.
Easy & Streamlined Migration
Many studios have been able to onboard to Hathora in less than a week. Migrating a live title obviously takes more effort. Fortunately, we’ve worked hard to simplify the migration process as much as possible, and studios have migrated live games to Hathora in just one month.
The path to migrate is straightforward:
- No game server SDK required – you can remove any GameLift specific dependencies from your game server when migrating, as Hathora’s game server integration is done via Dockerfile and allows easy ways to pass data like connection info as command line arguments when the server starts up. Check out this simple guide.
- Automated CI integration – Hathora has an intuitive CLI that makes it easy to deploy builds directly from your existing CI pipeline. You can even use your existing CI build ids in Hathora, to make the integration and operations even more seamless. Here’s a short guide on setting up CI/CD with Hathora.
- 1 API call for backend integration – Hathora’s CreateRoom API makes it easy to hook up your matchmaker/backend. We handle all of the infrastructure scaling and scheduling, your backend never has to think about capacity. Our flexible RoomConfig parameter makes it super easy to pass custom metadata to your game server directly.
We’ve prioritized building a platform that is easy and intuitive to start using. We even offer integration solutions at no cost. Our engineers can embed with your team and help with most of the migration steps!
The Time to Act is Now
Studios must put cloud costs under the microscope. It becomes obvious just how quickly AWS GameLift expenses spiral. A once-reasonable budget line item can suddenly consume a significant share of revenue, forcing tough trade-offs.
Leading studios have already made the switch off of the cloud. By analyzing their invoices, comparing options, and migrating to Hathora’s hybrid cloud solution, they’ve dramatically cut costs while improving performance and operational agility.
This isn’t just about saving money—it’s about taking control. With Hathora, studios get real-time scalability, flexible compute pools, and deep infrastructure insights, leading to better predictability and efficiency.
Cloud costs don’t fix themselves. Take control today—reach out and see how Hathora can help.
