@Archimodes
Sorry for the late response, I forgot that you had asked these questions.
Yes, we’re transitioning over to AWS; however we have no plans to use Gamelift. Streaming technology isn’t there quite yet - and I believe Gamelift is currently intended for Amazon Lumberyard.
We’re in the process of setting up cloudfront for our new launcher. The Cloudfront CDN requires a seed server which distributes the files to the various CDN servers around the world; and for that we’ve acquired a very powerful, high speed server located in Colorado.
Setting up the backend for distribution and payment has without a doubt been the most difficult and time consuming part of the process. The weekly work on the game is much more enjoyable.
In our specific case technical engineers at Valve confirmed that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do with Steam… but for any game with normal distribution requirements - I would almost certainly recommend going with Steam. One of our previous games was on Steam, so we were able to communicate closely with the Valve technical team. With Vizaris, we specifically wanted to link the monthly subscriptions to access to updates only (And by extension, multiplayer, as all users need to be at the same update level to play together) and not actually use the subscription to gate access to the game itself.
What that means is that the $4.99 buys you Vizaris and one month of updates. If your subscription expires, you’ll keep access to the game at it’s current level.
Unfortunately, on Steam, subscriptions are a simple on/off switch, meaning if your subscription expires, you lose access to everything.