When Ben Brode founded indie game studio Second Dinner in 2018, he and his team knew they had big shoes to fill—their own. Brode had risen to near-legendary status as the visionary behind Blizzard Entertainment’s award-winning strategy card game Hearthstone, released in 2012, which today boasts more than 100 million players. The opportunity for Second Dinner to develop a blockbuster of its own came in 2019 when it secured a license to create a digital, collectible card game using Marvel’s popular superhero characters.
But the company faced an enormous challenge: How would it deliver a Marvel-worthy AAA-size hit, the kind of game that usually takes years and hundreds of people to develop, with only its small but talented team of game designers?
Second Dinner knew the key to bringing its vision to life was to harness its team’s design superpowers. The company decided to use advanced cloud technology that would help the team develop faster and stay focused on creating an action-packed experience with eye-catching visuals. This strategy paid off, and in 2022 Second Dinner announced the global launch of its first mobile game, Marvel Snap, a strategic card battling game that won immediate critical acclaim.
Within weeks of the game’s introduction, more than 10 million players were collecting Marvel-themed virtual cards, seamlessly matchmaking and duking it out in fast-paced, king-of-the-hill-style card battles—like a frenetic battle scene in a Marvel film. The game’s successes piled up: Marvel Snap won the Mobile Game of the Year, the IGN award for Best Strategy Game, and then the Apple Design Award for Innovation. In 2023, Marvel Snap expanded from mobile-only to a fully available desktop version via the Steam platform.
“Not only did Second Dinner score major recognition and awards, but they also pulled off an epic achievement by creating, coding, designing, and launching their game to millions of players, all while avoiding launch-day issues,” says Chris Melissinos, principal evangelist for video games at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Assembling a Team for Creativity and Innovation
Behind the Marvel-themed mayhem and slick card play, Second Dinner’s leaders knew they needed a cost-effective, scalable, and hands-off infrastructure solution. The team wanted to remain free from guessing how many servers and racks they needed to buy and have on premises to run Marvel Snap. At the same time, they knew they needed to have enough server capacity right from the start to ensure that every player experienced lightning-fast response times and found quality matches. To keep costs as low as possible, they also wanted to make sure they didn't over-provision and maintain unused servers.
“The only way that we could even conceive of [creating Marvel Snap] was to get some help on the servers,” says Aaron Brunstetter, vice president of engineering at Second Dinner. “So we made decisions that would make it very easy for us to deploy and build on and iterate on our game without needing to have everyone understand everything that goes into it.”
Second Dinner adopted a serverless setup powered by Graviton2, a custom processor built by AWS, designed to deliver up to 40 percent better performance than comparable Amazon EC2 instances. Going serverless helped the Second Dinner team focus their resources on game design without having to worry about housing and managing racks of servers. And tasks such as server management, resource allocation, security patching, and instance scaling were managed by AWS, so Second Dinner’s developers could continue designing and delivering a AAA game at scale.
“Globally scalable, performant, secure, and reliable cloud infrastructure were critical to the successful launch of Marvel Snap,” Melissinos says. “We’re here to help developers focus on building better games and to make sure they only pay for what they require, not to manage their infrastructure.”
Says Brunstetter, “The exciting part about this endeavor was we made an early decision that we wanted to use AWS serverless technology. Players make a connection, make a request, and we…facilitate that request quickly. It spins up, it handles the things it needs to do, and it spins and it lets the player know the results, and then it goes away. And that was very exciting for us because basically it’s very elastic in its scaling.”
Connecting Millions of Players Around the World
The next challenge for the team was getting players into a seamless game environment where hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of players could be matchmaking at the same instant. “We want you to just hit a button and boom, you’re in and you’re playing against somebody,” Brunstetter says.
When Second Dinner attempted to build its own in-house matchmaking service out of the gate, it found that it couldn’t scale and support a player base in the hundreds of thousands during testing. This meant that the company wouldn’t have been able to scale up to the millions of players that were anticipated to arrive after the game was released. “Our goal is to get, as seamlessly and easily as possible, players into the game and playing against other players,” says Brunstetter. “So we started building our own matchmaking service. Eventually we just couldn’t support all of the kind of needs that we had to get thousands, if not hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of players to match quickly together.”
Matchmaking needs to evaluate and pair players for card battles within seconds; it can’t just be random pairings. Players all have different skill levels, so Second Dinner can’t pit someone who is highly skilled against someone brand new to the game without risking that new players will quit because of a poor experience.
Thanks to the power of the cloud, that’s not a problem. “We can handle so many more matches being created per minute than we could ever have hoped for. And they’re better matches, which keeps the players engaged,” says Brunstetter. “To have the backing of AWS for us on these core problems that every gaming company needs to solve, it enabled us to focus on what’s really important, which is actual gameplay—actually playing the cards.”
Snapping It All Together
By using the scalability and flexibility of Amazon GameLift, Marvel Snap seamlessly handles multiplayer battles, accommodating varying player loads. The adoption of serverless architecture continues to power the game’s backend so that Second Dinner can make real-time updates and event-driven interactions.
Together, these technologies play a pivotal role in ensuring the game’s performance, security, and reliability. Marvel Snap’s effective use of Amazon GameLift and serverless architecture has set a benchmark for future mobile game development, showcasing the immense potential of these technologies in delivering exceptional gaming experiences.
“Whether you are a team of two in a garage dreaming up the next big game or a AAA company managing massive, global hits,” Melissinos says, “AWS shifts the burden of building critical, undifferentiated services out of your way, allowing you to focus on just building awesome games.”
Learn more about how AWS cloud infrastructure can help you innovate to build and run secure and performant applications that create new customer experiences, improve efficiencies, and scale your business faster.
This story was produced by AWS and edited by WIRED Brand Lab.
