Massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is moving its servers to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud.
The cloud migration is kicking off this week with the hopes that it will improve the health and stability of the game, reallocate resources to focus more on game quality instead of hardware maintenance, enable easier updates, and extend its capacity to reach new players.
According to an announcement from SWTOR, the migration will be completed in small batches - starting with just one server named Leviathan on August 15 - which is anticipated to cause around six hours of downtime. The other servers will bounce at the first moment of migration but should work as normal after that.
Once successful, SWTOR will migrate the remaining four servers to the cloud. No anticipated timeline has been shared.
SWTOR first announced its plans to move to the cloud in March 2023, completing a test migration with AWS in April for one of its Asia-Pacific servers.
The game has an estimated 111,500 daily players across the world, and was created by BioWare in 2008, launching in 2011. In 2019, Electronic Arts announced the game had a lifetime revenue of $1 billion, five times its development costs. Development was recently moved over to Broadsword Games.
Hosting games on the cloud is becoming an increasingly attractive premise. With the wide breadth of cloud regions operated by major cloud providers including Google, AWS, and Microsoft, gaming companies can hand over hardware maintenance and operations while not sacrificing latency and reach.
Developer Riot Games, known for League of Legends and Valorant, hosts its games on AWS, taking advantage of the cloud giant's offerings including Regions, Local Zones and, where necessary, Outposts. We profiled the company earlier this year.
