AWS re:Invent 2025 - Another Axiom: Migrating the backend for hit game Gorilla Tag to AWS (IND396)

Source: Dev.to

Overview

AWS re:Invent 2025 – Another Axiom: Migrating the backend for hit game Gorilla Tag to AWS (IND396)

In this session, Morgan, a Services Engineer at Another Axiom, walks through the migration of their VR game backends (Gorilla Tag and Orion Drift) to AWS. He explains how they built Mothership, a backend‑as‑a‑service platform, using Amazon ECS and Aurora with a monolithic architecture deployed like microservices. By moving to Graviton ARM processors, they cut compute costs from $1,000 → $250 per day (≈ 60 % savings) and reduced total cloud spend by 30 %. The migration was completed in under a day with zero downtime.

Key takeaways

• Re‑evaluate assumptions after infrastructure changes.
• Use RDS Proxy to eliminate database connection bottlenecks.
• Partner with AWS account teams for expert guidance.
• Invest heavily in CI/CD pipelines; integration testing with Locust and the game SDK gave deployment confidence.

Video & Transcript Highlights

Introduction

Hi, I’m Morgan, Services Engineer and tech lead for Mothership, Another Axiom’s backend‑as‑a‑service platform. I’ll share the journey of migrating the backends for our popular VR games to AWS.

Agenda

1. Who we are at Another Axiom.
2. The state of the world before the project.
3. Architecture and implementation on AWS.
4. Load testing, cost optimization, and migration to Graviton.
5. Current status, lessons learned, and future plans.

About Another Axiom

We are a leading VR game studio focused on social, plausible, diegetic worlds and innovative interaction/locomotion systems. Our flagship titles:

• Gorilla Tag – a social sandbox where players play tag as gorillas.
• Orion Drift – a massively multiplayer sci‑fi social sports game.

Scale

• Gorilla Tag: ~17 million lifetime unique players; peak concurrent users (CCU) ≈ 100 k.
• Orion Drift: peaks of tens of thousands of concurrent users.

VR presents two major capacity‑planning challenges:

1. Seasonality – winter holidays can see an order‑of‑magnitude increase over summer lows.
2. Virality – community events can cause sudden “hockey‑stick” load spikes.

When I joined, everything ran on a popular third‑party platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS). As Gorilla Tag grew, we outgrew that solution.

Why Move In‑House?

• Limited support and feature‑request channels with the third‑party vendor.
• Specific needs for Meta Quest integration weren’t on their roadmap.
• A major viral event caused a service outage, highlighting the risk of relying on an external platform.

These factors pushed us toward an in‑house backend solution.

Building Mothership: A Custom Backend‑as‑a‑Service Platform

Key features required for Gorilla Tag’s live‑service operation:

• Identity & Authentication – verify player ownership, bans, etc.
• Moderation – tied closely to identity management.

(The transcript continues with further technical details on the platform architecture, load testing with Locust, CI/CD pipelines, and the Graviton migration.)