Quality of experience (QoE) assessment of games on workstations and mobile

Highlights

• The paper provides QoE assessment of online as games played via apps.

• Literature review provide of previous work.

• Results and discussion of QoE games assessment via different platforms.

• Last section depends on the conclusion.

Abstract

Gaming is a growing hobby in the young generation around the world and games are played from different platforms such as personal computer (PC)/mobile applications, online server and cloud services. Quality of experience (QoE) domain used for the assessment of user experience during the playing of the game. In this paper, we assess the QoE of the game players while playing different popular games such as Need for Speed Underground II and Subway Surfers, when they play the game from PC/mobile applications and online by using PC and mobile devices. The purpose of the research is to measure the satisfaction level for game playing from a different device and source by avoiding gaming CDs and kiosks. We provide descriptive and inferential analysis of user’s data and results show users are satisfied with application-based gaming visual quality, and big-screen display and online gaming have worst ratings for visual quality due to low graphics quality.

Introduction

The video gaming trend is growing rapidly, as the Newzoo market report asserts, the earnings of the global game will climb to $137.9 billion in 2018 and will reach $180 billion in 2021 [1]. With the broadband Internet and high-quality mobile phones becoming widespread, one of the key factors in the growth of games has been online web and app play. Users can play video gaming on their desktop and laptops using online web browsers or desktop gaming apps. Unlike mobile phones, desktops have better screen size and most screens support 4 K HD quality. According to market intelligence company Newzoo, 2019 will see mobile (and tablet) gaming generating more revenue than all other types of gaming such as console, PC and combined, etc.

Mobile usage is higher than desktop as people can access mobile anywhere at any time. Mobile users can play the game on their mobile online browsers or by downloading and installing video gaming apps [2]. Users play online games using a web interface on their desktop, laptop or mobile devices [3]. Browers-based games could be played using a web browser via HTML and HTML scripting technologies (most commonly JavaScript, ASP, PHP, and MySQL). For more complicated multiplayer interactive games, a recent trend in browser-based games is to use web technologies like Ajax to make this complicated interaction happen and WebGL to generate hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without the need for plugins.

In past, games on client-server model, required the purchasing and maintenance of dedicated on-premises or co-located servers to run the online infrastructure, something only large studios and publishers could afford. With today's cloud-based computer resources, game developers and publishers of any size can request and receive any resources on demand, helping to avoid costly up-front monetary outlays and the dangers of over or under provisioning hardware [4].

Online games use the cloud to stream games, and they did not require a high processing unit for rendering games and storage media, different emulators to install and play the game [5], [6], [7]. However, cloud rendered online games require high-speed networks, low configured systems with keyboard and screen to play the game [8], [9]. Cloud servers offer platform independent games so the user can play the same game using any device, anywhere in the world. Asian countries, especially China generate the biggest revenues from video gaming and are considered global gaming market leaders. Statista’s 2017 findings say Tencent Holdings, the Chinese entertainment giant, earned $15.6 billion from its online games, while Blizzard Entertainment, the US-based game development company, boasted only $2.13 billion in net profit [10].

Gaming is popular in China, and big gaming centers (café) are developed where a high processing unit with networking is used for playing online, single and multiplayer games as shown in Fig. 1. Mobile gaming provides mobility and plays games during the travel or anywhere by using apps and 3/4G network connections are shown in Fig. 2.

Many QoE frameworks were developed to measure and offer gaming services according to user needs but still, it is a big problem for gaming service providers to fulfill user requirements and delivery of quality of service (QoS) [11], [12], [13]. QoE based commercial video streaming cloud gaming platforms were proposed to provide QoS of games according to the user such as GaiKai [14], Ubitus [15] and OnLive [16] and GamingAnyWhere is open, cross-platform, efficient and modularized [17]. The game subjective/objective QoE assessment experiments were conducted by several researchers using different parameters such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), video codes, Video Quality & RTT and Network level QoS and Application QoS [18], [19], [20], [21], [22]. Online gaming service providers compress the game visual data to provide QoS on slow networks, provide mobility to mobile users compare to PC based gaming but this does not work.

QoE is defined as “a blueprint of all human subjective and objective quality needs and experiences arising from the interaction of a person with technology and with business entities in a particular context” [23]. The QoE methods are used for capturing user opinion about video quality, video streaming and network services and products [24], [25]. The QoE can be captured by using subjective and objective approaches [26]. The game playing experience is hugely impacted by the key quality of experience (QoE) factors of visual quality and screen size. However, limited research has been done from the quality of experience perspective to understand the impact of these two factors on an online web gaming on PC and mobile phones versus emulator/app on PC and mobile phones.

The main contribution of this paper is to study and explore:

• Gaming quality of experience offered by PC based online and app games versus Mobile based online and mobile app games using key QoE factors of visual (video) quality and display size satisfaction.

• Gaming experience between PC online web gaming experiences versus PC app experience based on QoE factors.

• Gaming experience Mobile online web gaming experience versus Mobile app experience QoE.

• We gathered data on two different video games: Need for speed underground 2 and Subway surfers, the purpose of using two different games with the difference in genre and type is to get more data about the user experience on different parameters, which provide more detailed information on user perception and satisfaction.

• The QoE subjective experiments using mean opinion score surveys were conducted to capture user’s feedback.

Our paper is organized as follows. Section 2 based on the related work of previous QoE research on games, Section 3 provides details of experiment design for QoE assessment. Results and discussion are provided in Section 4 and finally, in Section 5 we conclude our work.