Does Playing Online Mobile Games Overcharge You for the Fun?

With the growing popularity of online mobile games, the network traffic generated by them accounts for an increasingly significant proportion of mobile Internet traffic; however, the game's traffic characteristics have not been well studied. To understand more about such traffic, we analyze the network traffic of 9 online mobile games from 3 genres, namely, first-person shooting games, role-playing games, and racing games. Our results show that small payloads, high packet rates, and an excessive number of pure TCP ACK packets incur high traffic overheads. The payloads may have redundant content, which can be properly compressed. Given the increasing number of pay-by-volume and throttling 3G/4G data plans, gamers may not realize they are being overcharged due to such overheads. We observe that playing certain games costs players more than US$5 per hour under certain data plans. We also find that the overheads can be reduced without compromising users' gaming experience because the packet payloads are highly redundant.