Electronic Arts streamlines game patching with AWS

Electronic Arts (EA) engages players around the globe in immersive games across PC, console, and mobile. Known for popular game franchises including EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Battlefield, and Apex Legends, EA regularly releases new game versions to mitigate issues, make improvements, and add new in-game content. Quickly deploying these patches to player devices is crucial for providing a positive player experience.

This blog post discusses how EA has streamlined its game patching process for players using AWS services. By leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), EA delivers light and fast game patches, reducing patch installation times for their players.

Every game update requires players to download and install a large file on their machines, from tens to hundreds of gigabytes. Game patch computations previously took place on the client side and required several minutes to complete. The algorithm only compared files with the same name as the updated version, missing cases where data had moved between files. This resulted in inflated patch sizes, as any new or changed data had to be downloaded. Additionally, the block size for comparing data was set to a high value of 64KB on the client-side to minimize metadata, leading to redownloading of data that could have been copied from the local version. These issues yielded unnecessarily large patch sizes, which led to longer download times.

To address these challenges, EA implemented a new game patch deployment approach in August 2023 called Known Version Patching (KVP). KVP uses the knowledge of the installed version and language of the game to generate smaller patches with only the changed content. By moving the patch computation to the server side, KVP eliminates the time spent computing patches on the players’ machines and enables players to play the latest versions of their games more quickly. The solution downloads and unpacks the game on AWS, generates a hash of the game version, and creates a patch by comparing the hashes between two game versions. This automated process takes less than an hour to complete for a AAA title, outputting pre-computed, incremental patches for previous versions of the game.

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