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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has embraced 2016 by lowering the prices of C4, M4, and R3 instances by 5% in its EC2 cloud, as well as announcing the launch of its new Asia Pacific data centre region, in Seoul.

The price reductions, for C4 and M4 instances running Linux, apply to customers in the US East, US West, Ireland, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney regions, while the same applies for R3 instances but adding Brazil.

The M4 instances were launched back in June as ‘next generation’ with the aim of providing lower network latency and less packet jitter, a move analyst house Zacks.com described as “an added feather to its cap.”

Customers concerned over how much they will get billed at the end of this month should note the reductions for on-demand and dedicated hosting apply retroactively as of January 1, while reserved instances are in effect as of January 5. The move represents the 51st AWS price cut overall.

Elsewhere, the South Korean AWS data centre is now open for business, having been originally announced in November alongside India, Ohio, a second region in China, and the UK – the latter of which this publication recently analysed. The Seoul region has two availability zones, bringing the total to 32 ‘zones’ from 12 geographic regions, including its government cloud. Each cloud provider has different definitions over its data centre footprint, but for comparison Microsoft – who is also launching a UK data centre this year – lists 20 ‘regions’ in its portfolio.

One company which is grabbing the chance to house data in Seoul through AWS is Korean gaming firm Nexon, which has more than two thirds of its sales coming from overseas. “We are currently running our new mobile MMORPG game, HIT, 100% on AWS,” said Sang-Won Jung, Nexon VP of new development. “With the new AWS region in Korea, we plan to use AWS not just for mobile games, but also for latency sensitive PC games as well.”

You can find out more about the EC2 price cuts here and the Seoul data centre launch here.