Considering they are (or at least were a week ago) looking for server programmers I think its likely that you're spot on. Server programmers write the code that runs the game on their side. They'd be needed more for utilizing Amazon's servers, and hopefully their multiple datacenters, than for the NCSoft side. For the old servers, the hardware would have been up to NCSoft, and if they were upgrading, it would have been done in stages and not have affected operations. Why would ArenaNet move? Amazon is certainly more expensive than using their own datacenter. ArenaNet is either looking to move further away from NCSoft, or they were hitting a limitation due to the servers (like the Wintersday JP problem). Amazon is obviously going to have a lot more resources, but if they only wanted more power, there was no reason to move nearly everything. Who uses Amazon? Building for Amazon is like optimizing for >4 core CPUs; most games don't. GW2 however was designed for this type of structure, as every instance is a virtual server.Could be. I don't work for arena-net so I really don't have any idea what they are doing or why.