Wondering why your gaming performance is not matching other people? The city where you live might also be responsible for your poor gaming experience.
According to a recent study by London-based network analytics firm OpenSignal, Ahmedabad, Navi Mumbai, and Vadodara are the top three Indian cities to enjoy mobile games. In the chart of 48 cities where Opensignal analysed the mobile network experience, Ahmedabad, Navi Mumbai, and Vadodara scored 71.7, 70.1 and 69.8 respectively.
Interestingly Ahmedabad and Mumbai are the only Tier 1 cities that found a place in the top ten cities, along with Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities like Surat, Thane, and Rajkot. India’s Silicon Valley – Bengaluru – couldn’t even find a place in the top 20 and is placed at 22nd position with a score of 61.3.
Here is how Opensignal conducted this analysis:
There are a range of technical network characteristics that together affect the Games Experience, of which three key factors are:
UDP (User Datagram Protocol) Latency: Packet delay, which characterizes the responsiveness of the network connection for time-sensitive applications, especially mobile gaming. For example, lower latencies improve the reaction times of players in action games.
Packet loss: The proportion of data packets that never reach their destination. In a game, this means the player’s actions may never take effect, or that the state of the game stops being communicated back to the player. This hurts a player’s ability to enjoy a game and makes it harder to win.
Jitter: The variability of the arrival time of data packets. All data packets take time to travel between locations — for example between a player and the game server — but often the amount of delay varies between packets. Higher jitter levels are often a sign of network congestion caused by routers struggling to pass on data packets.
Visualizing how network conditions affect mobile gaming
With both animations, the bottom panel is an example of a gaming experience without any network issues, while the panel above shows what happens when network performance is impaired.
Often there is a relationship between these three inputs and their effect on a player’s experience. The lower the UDP, packet loss and jitter, the better the Games Experience.
India’s mobile gaming industry, in recent years, has recorded a tremendous growth in terms of number of users. According to an estimate by App Annie, the number of mobile gaming users is estimated to reach 680 million by the end of this year.
A great credit to this growth goes to games like PUBG, CounterStrike and others. According to a latest report of the Industry body FICCI and the professional services provider firm Ernst & Young, the total revenue (including taxes) of the Indian gaming business was around Rs 6,460 crores in 2019.
