Is mobile internet good enough for real-time gaming?

So is the average person's mobile internet good enough for real-time gaming? I know mine is and most of my friends there mobile internet can reach speeds of 50mbitps which is definitely fast enough.

Is there a website that has stats on what percentage of mobile gamers has connection to 3-4g internet? I play a pool game on my phone sometimes which is turn based and I regularly encounter people with really slow connections. Now for turn based games this doesn't really matter but in a real-time game one slow down of your internet could mean you get killed because you were standing AFK for 2 seconds..

I also would love to hear if you think people would be interested to play 2v2 multiplayer games on there phones (or 1v1v1v1 for that matter).

 

Depends what you target region is since some countries or regions have poor networks or expensive ones so regular consumers wont be using them. For real-time you probably would want to have your app require wifi and the game sessions should be short. Generally mobile users like short sessions anyways.

 

The big problem is it will never be consistent. Wifi has the same issue because radio can't guarantee a stable connection. It's not uncommon to suddenly have your latency skyrocket, or to find that you disconnect and drop a couple seconds worth of packets.

 

Are most people gaming on WiFi? I mean I don't really game on mobile so I have no clue but when I sometimes play games on mobile it's always away from home(so on 4g).

 

SHADOWGUN: DeadZone seem to work pretty well

 

Clash Royale works very well too, both wifi and mobile and haven't really noticed my opponents from all over the world dropping out too often cause of connection but rather giving up. It could be said it's real time since it requires you to react opponent actions pretty fast.

 

Hi, I have gamed on wireless internet for a little while and played Planetside 2(MMOFPS), Diablo 3 amongst others successfully, remarkably successful considering. This is on 3G wireless internet. I live in Aus and the biggest issue is cost. You can get a cheap ADSL2+ plan with 100+Gb for the same price as 4Gb Wireless . Yes you can dropouts and depending on the users in your area have a volatile experience.

I wouldnt recommend Planetside 2 on wireless though, it is very expensive on bandwith(as expected lol), D3 however is fine in that regards, with 4gb/Month giving me a couples hrs a night,

Casual Online games marketed to the mobile market should have no problems with connections, even latency demanding games.

 

What's most important is the infrastructure serving the players.

You want to keep pings below 100ms for realtime multiplayer, and even better, under 60ms.

Only very small packets of data are sent in realtime, so line speed is not really a factor here.

Setting up a server infrastructure so players connect and match automatically with players closest to the same server are important, and if you can manage and implement this effectively, you shouldn't have any problems, assuming the net code is well written and efficient, and your Unity game makes good use of best practices of what to send and when.