Empirical QoE study of in-home streaming of online games

In-home streaming of online game content to a wide range of low-end and thin client devices via wired/wireless local area connections mitigates the effects of network limitations that pose challenges in directly delivering cloud-based games to such devices. In this paper, we study whether (and to what extent) the rendering and streaming of game content to client devices (from an in-home server) imposes a degradation in gaming QoE as compared to the case of playing using a traditional online game client. We report on the results of an empirical study whereby an in-home game streaming scenario is set up using the GamingAnywhere platform, and participants are asked to provides subjective QoE assessments while playing a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing game (World of Warcraft). We test the impact of different delay and loss conditions, emulated along the external Internet link from the online game server to the home. Results show that switching from an online client to a in-home streaming client consistently results in perceived game quality degradations. Further, we report on the “willingness to keep playing” under different network condition in both online and in-home game streaming cases.