[robryan]

Best of both worlds I guess, I'd imagine they could run it on their own servers a lot cheaper but would get destroyed when a new game peaked. Using the EC2 as overflow they can make the best use out of their own servers rather than buying up big computing power that is only ever used in user spikes.

[bonsaitree]

Yes. An suitable analogy can be made to a hybrid car. Local servers (electric motor & batteries) for constant/idle-demand and EC2 (internal combustion engine) for high bandwidth & storage overflow during version deployments and peak loads.

We actually recommend this solution our clients who already have significant sunk costs and long-term SLA contracts in hardware and datacenter services.