Opensignal has just published its first-ever report on the state of mobile gaming experience worldwide. With mobile gaming getting traction, the latest report looks into measuring real-world mobile network conditions which affect gaming across different networks in 100 countries.
The latest report is based on over 128 billion measurements taken from over 37 million devices worldwide for the period between October 2019 to January 2020. The technical data is combined with detailed feedback received from players that tested mobile games such as Fortnite, Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) and multiplayer online battery arena (MOBA) game Arena of Valor.
In Asia Pacific, Malaysia ranks #11 with a score of 67.6 which is categorised as “Fair”. This puts us ahead of Indonesia, India, Philippines and Cambodia, but behind Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong and Armenia. Unsurprisingly, Singapore offers the best experience in the world with an “Excellent” score of 85.5.
Malaysia performed above the Asia Pacific average score of 61.1 but they do note that the Asia Pacific has the most diverse experience with almost equal distribution of countries with Very Poor to Excellent rating. If you look at the worldwide scale, Malaysia is in 50th place among the 100 countries evaluated.
According to Opensignal’s category definition for Mobile Gaming Experience, “Excellent” means that the network experience is acceptable and players felt that they have control over the game with immediate feedback while not having any noticeable delay. For “Good”, it means that most users don’t experience a delay in the actions and the game, while “Fair” still represents a pretty responsive experience but a majority of gamers would have experienced a delay in their gaming.
For “Poor” and “Very Poor” category, these are basically unacceptable levels of gaming experience with lack of controllability and they don’t receive immediate feedback on their actions.
From the findings, developers would need to focus on compensating for latency, jitter and packet loss which affect players’ experience on multiplayer games. Since there are markets with poor mobile gaming experience, it would be harder for them to win in challenging multiplayer titles.
However, it is also worth pointing out that despite the poor rated gaming experience, countries such as Indonesia have been winning mobile gaming tournaments such as MLBB and PUBG Mobile.
With the upcoming rollout of 5G, gamers can look forward to a better experience thanks to lower latency. On a 5G SA network, you can expect ping of less than 10ms which will improve the responsiveness and reliability for mobile games.
Opensignal also added that more parties are jumping onto the mobile gaming bandwagon and this includes Apple Arcade which is an unlimited gaming subscription service. Even Google has a cloud-based gaming service called Stadia but it is marred by terrible lag and latency issues. On top of that, device makers are also targetting hardcore mobile gamers by releasing gaming-centric flagship smartphones such as the ROG Phone, Black Shark and the Razer Phone.
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