Mobile gaming has generally been seen as a poor cousin to gaming on consoles and PCs. Small screens, limited input options, and potential unreliability of mobile connections has meant that mobile gaming’s main successes have been freemium match-three puzzles and simple tower defence games. It may currently be the biggest segment of the gaming industry in terms of revenue, but it’s a crowded market that some developers have described as broken. For many games, profits rely on a small percentage of consumers, known as “whales”, who will buy way more than the average consumer - making it tricky to build a sustainable business model.
But what defines “mobile gaming” is changing, all thanks to 5G. In the US especially, 5G is being used to offer fixed wireless access in places where fibre cannot reach, or to simply avoid digging up roads and gardens. So now that it’s not just games on smartphones and tablets that are using mobile connections, are these connections up to the task?
Need for speed
Today’s biggest online games are often more demanding than the most successful mobile apps. The most popular in recent years are fast-paced shooters in a shrinking arena, with the likes of PUBG, Apex Legends and Fortnite - the latter big enough to be more of a cultural phenomenon than a mere game.
Other popular genres include MOBAs (games like DOTA2 and League of Legends) and real-time strategy, of which Starcraft 2 is by far the biggest. Again, these rely on quick reactions, to the extent that the best players perform 300-600 “actions per minute”. That’s between five and ten mouse clicks or keypresses every second.
As well as these fast inputs, these games also rely on quick reactions based on information that’s as up to date as possible, to the millisecond. PUBG and Fortnite matches often come down to a chaotic standoff where a reaction time just fractions of a second faster could mean victory.
Mobile games are designed around the restrictions of the devices and the connections that have historically been possible. That’s why real-time interactions common in console games tend to be more limited. So is it possible for the mobile connections used in lieu of fixed connections, to cope with the demands of modern gaming? The answer lies in network slicing.
Slicing like a Fruit Ninja
Traditionally, mobile connections offered every device and service the same ‘best effort’ for wireless connectivity, but different services actually have different needs. Gaming is one such application. Without very low latency, it won’t be the best skill or reactions that will win a match, but instead the best connection.
One way to provide a gamer with the connection they need is through a specialised network slice. This network slice is a dedicated virtual network can be set up with specific SLAs to meet particular requirements. This isn’t restricted to gaming - it can have many applications. For example, long battery life and low cost may be the primary drivers for an IoT network slice designed for wildlife monitoring or smart city applications.
Self-driving cars will on the other hand require a network slice that provides extremely low latencies, and a connection that is ultra-reliable. A slice dedicated to video games will be similar to this, but the SLAs will likely be less stringent - after all, ensuring reliability for remote medicine could be a matter of life and death, whereas for games it’s only virtual death and their gaming experience that’s at stake.
Gaming is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and the professional “esports” that are most demanding of networks is predicted to be worth over a billion dollars this year. Creating network slices dedicated to gaming - and partnering with the gaming giants that want their multiplayer games to be a success - could mean that network operators have a chance of being a valuable part of this ever-growing industry.
Edging towards the future
Google’s Stadia is an idea that’s been tried before with little success, to the extent that one of the first results on googling it is “Is Google Stadia possible?”. Pitched as a “Netflix for games”, the idea is to banish the console from the home altogether, and instead use the cloud.
The problem that plagued previous attempts is latency. Input has to travel from the user to the remote console, all of the computing takes place in the cloud, and the output - not just data on the other players as in a standard multiplayer game, but a high-resolution video stream - has to travel all the way back. Google’s previews have hinted at similar issues that have all but killed previous attempts, with headlines like I tried Google's Stadia, and latency got me killed, and journalists complaining that the service just isn’t as responsive as a console that sits under the TV.
If there’s a solution to this issue, it may again lie with Edge computing. Even with a dedicated slice for gaming, 5G is unlikely to be enough to handle the video streams at a high enough resolution to be satisfactory. But edge computing platforms, by processing data closer to the user than public cloud servers do, could deliver the reduced latency necessary for success.
Google isn’t the only company looking to move gaming to the cloud - in fact, Sony has already tried it and Microsoft has its own Project xCloud. Just like network slicing, edge computing means network operators have an opportunity to help deliver these services to consumers and be part of a major shift in an industry that can boast of being as big as: music, TV, or cinema. And the key to making the service feasible could lie in partnerships between games service providers and network operators.
