Case Study: Naughty Dog achieves scalable, cost-effective multiplayer gaming with Amazon Web Services

Naughty Dog - Customer Case Study

Naughty Dog, the studio behind Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, and the Uncharted series, needed a more flexible and cost-effective online infrastructure after relying on expensive local servers for Jak X: Combat Racing. Preparing Uncharted 2 and later Uncharted 3, the company sought a scalable backend that would reduce costs and let engineers troubleshoot and optimize performance quickly.

They migrated online components to AWS—using Amazon S3 for instructional content, profiles and game results, EC2 for matchmaking and Redis processing (with EBS) plus replication to S3, and CloudFront for large updates—enabling live debugging (major beta bugs were fixed in 16 hours). The move delivered on-demand scaling, roughly 90% savings versus on-premises costs, and supported the successful launches and continued popularity of Uncharted 2 and 3.

Naughty Dog

Christophe Balestra

Co-President