Towards the Influence of Audio Quality on Gaming Quality of Experience

Humans are fascinated by video games for many years, which intrinsically immerse players in their virtual environments. Apart from the challenges offered by steadily new game concepts, aesthetically pleasing environments and characters, stories, and sound effects are highly important for the player experience. Recently, the new concept of cloud gaming, which offers users to play games executed on a cloud server remotely, is becoming increasingly popular. While cloud gaming offers many advantages, additional audio and video streaming poses many technical challenges. To ensure a satisfying Quality of Experience (QoE) of their customers, all stakeholders are interested in finding out which aspects of a gaming experience are of high importance and how resources can be optimally allocated. However, gaming QoE is a multidimensional construct including hedonic and pragmatic aspects and could be strongly influenced by interaction quality, video quality, and audio quality. While the impact of network and video encoding parameters of cloud gaming services was investigated in much detail in recent years, not many studies about the effect of audio quality on gaming experiences are available. Thus, in this paper, the impact of audio quality on gaming experience under different bitrate and packet loss conditions using two popular games is investigated. Therefore, a subjective experiment adhering to the ITU-T Rec. P.809 was conducted. The results show a significant impact of packet loss on audio quality and the overall gaming QoE. However, no significant effect of the bitrate, which was reduced to a minimum of 32 kbps, was revealed. Additionally, the influence of audio quality on gaming QoE was stronger for a game, which contained mainly diegetic effect sounds compared to a game containing few diegetic sounds and affect sound as background music.