The gaming market is serious business. From its low-profile beginnings within the four walls of homes where individual gamers fought for their turn on gaming consoles and wired remotes, tied to monitors, the gaming sector is now a full-fledged global industry. It’s a sector that has been witnessing acceleration in terms of technology, innovation, and growth.

It’s a new world—spurred on by the pandemic—that now inhabits your virtual avatars in multiple realistic 3D worlds, AI-enabled connected virtual universes, and AR and VR-powered experiences. The advent of 5G, AR and VR, and the metaverse and multiverse are going to revolutionise the gaming industry like never before.

They are creating a gaming experience that’s advanced, interactive, and more immersive—increasing expectations of gamers, and making the gaming landscape more competitive for gaming creators and providers. Gamers expect real-time, low-latency, high-bandwidth, and seamless gaming experiences. This puts pressure on providers to invest in expensive servers with high-processing power, data-intensive workloads, and setting up data centre infrastructure.

Packing more punch into 5G, AR and VR, and the metaverse and multiverse—to create a more cohesive, effective, and cost-efficient gaming ecosystem—is the formidable force of edge computing and edge gaming.

Edge computing and edge gaming extend the traditional interconnected cloud model of large data centres to leverage smaller and physically closer data centres. This enables distribution of cloud processing more efficiently, as it ensures latency-intensive workloads are placed closer to the end user.

Here’s how AR and VR, 5G, and the metaverse and multiverse are redefining gaming.

AR and VR Gaming Gain Ground

While AR and VR gaming have taken a while to gather steam, it’s also true that there are hardly any alternatives for an immersive first-person video gaming experience.

Today, post-pandemic, the demand for AR and VR games is skyrocketing. A recent report by Industry ARC predicts that the AR and VR video game market will grow with a CAGR of 18.5 percent between 2021 and 2026.

There are several reasons for this uptick. AR and VR headsets are becoming more affordable. South East Asian companies are gearing up to manufacture low-cost AR and VR headsets, making gaming more accessible to all.

But AR and VR gaming require a lot of data processing. When running VR games for multiplayer gaming—where games need to figure out where players are in real time—there is no room for latency. Data needs to be processed quickly and near real time.

Hosting game servers on the edge fixes that problem. The edge platform matches players who are physically near one another to reduce latency. It renders games from the servers closest to the gamers’ location to reduce lag.

This makes the AR and VR gaming experience more powerful. It reduces latency and allows gamers to get the complete multiplayer game experience.

The Grand Entry of 5G

When 5G becomes mainstream this year, it will make mobile networks faster by 20x. This will open new opportunities for the gaming industry.

With 5G, gamers will be able to stream VR games from edge servers faster and with a more immersive gaming experience. 5G can improve the gaming experience by providing high-definition video streaming on the go and in real time. Gamers can follow multiple players across multiple screens, powered by different providers—all without lag.

In most parts of the world, 5G is already making an appearance in the gaming arena. A case in point is Milan Games week held in 2019. The finals of the first live mobile gaming tournament was supported by Vodafone Italy’s 5G network.

Edge Gaming helps ensure 5G is feasible when dealing with millions of devices connected to a 5G network. Without edge gaming, all these devices would be transmitting data directly to the cloud. This would increase the need for bandwidth necessary for transmission to the cloud significantly, countering the effectiveness of 5G.

The Immersive Worlds of Multiverse and Metaverse

Game creators want to increase value by keeping players hooked to their platforms. They want to achieve this by increasing loyal subscribers or through transforming them into an engaged audience.

In order to do that, game creators are gravitating towards the multiverse and the metaverse that allow user interaction within virtual gaming worlds.

Multiverse is a collection of video games that are Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO). They provide players with access to many instances of user-generated subgames and a set of different virtual universes, where players can switch between the universes.

Metaverse, on the other hand, is a 3D, immersive virtual platform where users can interact with each other by creating their own AI-powered avatars in a highly realistic virtual world. The Metaverse is a network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations.

Both multiverse and metaverse require high-level, rapid, and synchronised computing. They need the pull of a powerful network infrastructure that can offer high bandwidth and low latency at scale.

With Edge Gaming, the network edge can also allocate more network resources to deliver more capacity and higher-bandwidth connectivity for metaverse and multiverse applications.

TM Edge Gaming is a holistic edge gaming ecosystem that leverages TM’s edge facility located closer to the end user to provide a high quality, low latency, reliable, stable, and immersive digital gaming experience. TM Edge Gaming is compatible with all devices and operating systems and also provides API integration with ISPs for a smoother end user experience.

Gaming providers can now pay-as-you-grow, scale capacity requirement, and equip themselves with a turnkey solution that enables them to go to market faster. TM Edge Gaming enables gamers to enjoy ultra-low latency gaming experiences with stable connectivity and faster streaming speeds. With edge gaming, gamers don’t have to buy high-end devices to experience high-end games or download games to their devices, they can now play on-the-go and on any device of their choice.

Capitalise on 5G, AR and VR, and multiverse and metaverse with TM Edge Gaming. Start your game-changing journey today.