Originally published by Mobile World Magazine on October 18, 2020, Game Bench founder and CEO, Sri Iyer shares his insight into the developing relationship between 5G technologies and the mobile gaming market in the following article.
We recently heard some interesting stats for game studios, which came to us by way of a contact at Google:
Improving your Play Store rating from 3.3 stars to 4.1 stars is correlated, on average, with a gain of 150 percent in revenues.
Moreover, one of the best ways to achieve this improved rating is by optimising the speed and fluidity of your game, because 60 percent of four-star reviews mention this particular aspect of user experience.
Don’t be fooled by the nostalgic graphics and simple gameplay. Nintendo’s new mobile title, Super Mario Run, is a real battery guzzler due to its blistering 60fps frame rate, high CPU usage and always-on network connectivity. This is true of both the iOS and Android versions of the game, but the impact on user experience (and hence potentially on user reviews and revenues) is more surprising on certain top-end Android phones. Let's take a look at some numbers...
It’s a perk of my line of work that I usually get given a new phone to try out every couple of months. But despite this (much appreciated) luxury, I still like to go into phone stores once in a while to get a feel for what shoppers are asking for and what they’re being sold.
That’s how I ended up at a central London branch of Carphone Warehouse just in time to receive a pitch from a very suave and eloquent salesman who was trying to sell me an iPhone 7. “Have you tried it yet?!” he asked, with apparently genuine excitement.
It was halfway through this conversation that a thought struck me: He hasn’t once asked me about my usage profile. Do I play games? Do I watch a lot of Netflix? Do I spend my evenings on social media? Am I an avid mobile photographer? Am I a pure business user, just checking emails and making calls? His sales patter made room for none of this.
Intro and summary
GameBench is very different to other mobile benchmarks, because it is designed to measure the performance of mobile devices running real workloads. These workloads are simply apps — the very same apps and games that ordinary smartphone owners download and run every day.
Most benchmarks used in the mobile industry today are synthetic, which means they test artificial workloads that are never encountered by real customers and can at best only approximate real-world usage.
Each type of benchmark has its place, but there are three evidence-based ways in which GameBench offers a more useful alternative, and very often a direct counterpoint, to traditional benchmarks: