Stripped-down no more: How mobile delivers the full gaming experience

gamespot.com:

Mobile gaming is one of the industry's fastest-growing sectors, and it keeps getting bigger. It generated $93.2 billion in 2021, comprising more than half of the gaming market. With mobile gaming on the rise, big publishers are taking notice. Players like Take-Two and Xbox Game Studios have recently made major mobile gaming acquisitions, betting on continued growth.

A significant driver of this growth is that technology is catching up with ambition. LTE had the speed for gaming, but mobile players could run into latency issues that made massively multiplayer games somewhat frustrating and unresponsive. The same was true for cloud gaming, which allows players to enjoy console or PC games by streaming them. Cloud gaming requires the network to do the heavy lifting--normally the job of the console--which makes network latency critical in order to ensure low input lag and responsive controls.

5G networks from providers like AT&T aim to solve that challenge, giving mobile gamers access to optimized connections that let them enjoy games to their fullest. Specifically, AT&T is opening mobile gaming to new audiences by uniquely including subscriptions from Google Stadia and Nvidia GeForce NOW, and by optimizing its 5G and Fiber networks for gaming on the go, making sure latency is low and frame rate performance is consistent.

While mobile gaming experiences are now coming into their own with the power of 5G networks, it hasn’t always been that way.

A big blocker for mobile gaming used to be hardware – but no longer. Early Android and iOS phones didn’t have the processing power and energy efficiency to deliver AAA gaming experiences. Those times have long passed, and nearly all mobile devices on sale today can power high-fidelity