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In recent years, cloud gaming has become a popular research topic and has claimed many benefits in the commercial domain over conventional gaming. While, cloud gaming platforms have frequently failed in the past, they have received a new impetus over the last years that brought it to the edge of commercial breakthrough. The fragility of the cloud gaming market may be caused by the high investment costs, offered pricing models or competition from existing "à la carte" platforms. This paper aims at investigating the costs and benefits of both platform types through a twofold approach. We first take on the perspective of the customers, and investigate several cloud gaming platforms and their pricing models in comparison to the costs of other gaming platforms. Then, we explore engagement metrics in order to assess the enjoyment of playing the offered games. Lastly, coming from the perspective of the service providers, we aim to identify challenges in cost-effectively operating a large-scale cloud gaming service while maintaining high QoE values. Our analysis provides initial, yet still comprehensive reasons and models for the prospects of cloud gaming in a highly competitive market.
The recently published ITU-T Recommendation G1.032 proposes a list of factors that may influence cloud and online gaming Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper provides two practical evaluations of proposed system and context influence factors: First, it investigates through an online survey (n=488) the popularity of platforms, preferred ways of distribution, and motivational aspects including subjective valuations of characteristics offered by today's prevalent gaming platforms. Second, the paper evaluates a large dataset of objective metrics for various gaming platforms: game lists, playthrough lengths, prices, etc., and contrasts these metrics against the gamers' opinions. The combined data-driven approach presented in this paper complements in-person and lab studies usually employed.
To deliver the best user experience (UX), the human-centered design cycle (HCDC) serves as a well-established guideline to application developers. However, it does not yet cover network-specific requirements, which become increasingly crucial, as most applications deliver experience over the Internet. The missing network-centric view is provided by Quality of Experience (QoE), which could team up with UX towards an improved overall experience. By considering QoE aspects during the development process, it can be achieved that applications become network-aware by design. In this paper, the Quality of Experience Centered Design Cycle (QoE-CDC) is proposed, which provides guidelines on how to design applications with respect to network-specific requirements and QoE. Its practical value is showcased for popular application types and validated by outlining the design of a new smartphone application. We show that combining HCDC and QoE-CDC will result in an application design, which reaches a high UX and avoids QoE degradation.