Totally worth it if Internet download speeds were not 5mbps in most parts of the country. Even if you had Google fiber, i think latency would kill most game types i think... Unless the Amazon instance compensated for the latency on your end.

Actually, that's interesting. The structure of how multiplayer games compensate for latency would need to change.

old games like quake 2 waited for all connected players to input a command, and all of the typical client processing (the graphics, your model position, etc) was handled by the server. That's how game files were so small. In a way, this isn't different, assuming that your server is close to the nearest ec2 data center, which is generally the case.

If not though, I think the only way this would take off is if multiplayer games had built in a mechanic that calculates the distance between the server, the client running in Amazon, and the user inputting commands at, say, a cafe. That's one extra degree of separation, but doable. It just changes...... Pretty much how everything works.

Out of curiosity, would you support a tiered internet structure if it would provide better speeds to support this?

Loool and I apologize if you're not from the States