Troubleshooting Amazon GameLift Streams

Choose the closest AWS Region possible to the end users. High latency from your clients to the Region hosting your stream can impact stream quality. You can ping AWS console endpoints in the Region to get an approximate latency measurement.

Verify your stream group has capacity for new streams.

Verify that connectionTimeout is reasonably set. Increase it to allow more time for customers to connect before timing out.

Open the UDP ports 33435-33465 to allow streaming from Amazon GameLift Streams. If Amazon GameLift Streams can't reach these ports, it can lead to streaming issues, such as a black or grey screen.

Verify that your internet connection can sustain a connection speed of at least 10 MBps for a 1080p stream. If you detect network issues while playing on Amazon GameLift Streams, your internet speed might be fluctuating and you might not be getting at least 10 MBps consistently. Run an internet speed test and continue through the troubleshooting steps.

Use a wired network if possible. When using Wi-Fi, move your device close to your router for stronger signal strength.

If you're using a Wi-Fi router with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, try connecting to a different band. If you're unsure how to switch your router to a different band, visit the support pages of the manufacturer or provider of your Wi-Fi router. You can also contact their customer service.

Identify if others on the same network (especially when on home Wi-Fi) are running high-bandwidth applications like video streaming, downloading, online gaming, or backups.

Close other applications on your device that take up bandwidth.

Don't use a VPN or proxy while streaming. They can cause higher latencies and block the gameplay.

Verify you're using Wi-Fi instead of cellular networks when playing on an iPad or iPhone. Using a cellular network can result in connectivity issues.

MacOS users should disable Location Services as it will cause the Wi-Fi to pause from time to time, which will lead to a poor streaming experience.

Your machine might have more powerful hardware than Amazon GameLift Streams. Make sure to test the application on a machine with similar performance as the hardware that Amazon GameLift Streams uses, which is similar to a laptop with NVIDIA 2070 GPU.

The problem might be due to your network connection or Amazon GameLift Streams's settings. Try the troubleshooting tips in the Connectivity issues section.

For Unreal Engine games, refer to Profiling Unreal Engine performance.

Run your application on a different machine to verify that it's correctly packaged. This confirms that your application content doesn't contain any hardcoded paths, missing assets, libraries, or binaries that might not work on other devices.

(Optional) Run your application on a machine with a GPU that's comparable to your Amazon GameLift Streams stream class. This verifies that your application's rendering settings are compatible with the GPU and that the performance meets your expectations.

Open the UDP ports 33435-33465 to allow streaming from Amazon GameLift Streams. If Amazon GameLift Streams can't reach these ports, it can lead to streaming issues, such as a black or grey screen.

Verify that your application is compatible with Proton. Test your application on a local environment without the Amazon GameLift Streams server to verify that it's compatible with Proton. For instructions, see Troubleshoot compatibility with Proton for Amazon GameLift Streams.

Use the correct executable. For your application to work correctly with Amazon GameLift Streams, set the application path to the full executable that's located in the Binaries/Win64/ subfolder, or similar. Unreal Engine produces two executables: a small executable (a shortcut) at the root of the folder, and a full executable in the Binaries/Win64/ subfolder. If the full executable is missing, the application might have not been built correctly. For example, see the following folder structure for a sample Unreal application:

BuildApp
|-> MyUnrealApp.exe
|-> MyUnrealApp
            |-> Binaries
                    |-> Win64
                            |-> MyUnrealApp.exe 

Turn off Unreal Engine Asserts. Disable Check, Verify, and Ensure macros. This can prevent the application from creating crash dumps, which otherwise causes the application to stall on Amazon GameLift Streams. If Asserts are enabled, you should expect a delay. For more information, see Asserts in Unreal Engine documentation.

If the IAM role has an explicit "deny-all" policy, you must explicitly list Amazon GameLift Streams as an exception to that policy by adding "gameliftstreams:*" to the NotAction element. For example:

{
    "Sid": "DenyAllExceptListedIfNoMFA",
    "Effect": "Deny",
    "NotAction": [
        "iam:CreateVirtualMFADevice",
        "iam:EnableMFADevice",
        "iam:GetUser",
        "iam:ListMFADevices",
        "iam:ListVirtualMFADevices",
        "iam:ResyncMFADevice",
        "sts:GetSessionToken",        
        "gameliftstreams:*"                    // Add this
    ],
    "Resource": "*",
    "Condition": {
        "BoolIfExists": {"aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent": "false"}
    }
}

For additional troubleshooting, review the Troubleshooting access denied error messages in the IAM User Guide.