Dubai
The Middle East and Africa region is home to the world’s most active gaming community, especially Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but the latency lag of the WiFi network is a stumbling block.
Amanullah Khan, managing director of Linksys Middle East, Turkey and Africa, said that gaming enthusiasts spend serious money on game play and they want technology that gives them a clear advantage over their rivals.
He said that even though prioritisation can be done with the current non-gaming routers at home but what happens when you prioritise is that other devices connected to the router lags. So, it is not optimising the bandwidth and the WiFi connection.
“40 per cent of the gaming PCs, or one in 10 PCs, comes with a killer prioritisation engine built into it. With a non-gaming router, the gamer cannot enjoy the full potential of the PC,” he said after unveiling a dedicated gaming router by teaming up with Rivet Networks — WRT32X — to provide serious online gamers the only router optimised for high-speed gaming for users with killer-enabled gaming PCs.
“What the router does is that it identifies the killer prioritisation engine and prioritise games. It optimises traffic for low latency and less lag and ensures that the PC’s gaming, audio, and video is fast and smooth, while simultaneously managing other online traffic in the home to ensure other devices and activities are not compromised,” he said.
Moreover, he said that the new firmware and graphical user interface (GUI) is also custom-built from the ground up with a focus on monitoring and controlling gaming network traffic.
The router slashes the peak ping rate [the time taken by the packet to leave the PC, through the router and over the network, and reaching the gaming server and bringing the response back] by up to 77 per cent — giving them a clear edge over opponents who use non-gaming routers, he added.
“The biggest challenge for a gamer is the ping rate and if that can be reduced, then think how powerful the system will be.”
“During our research into the way serious gamers use their internet connections and the kind of networking technology they have at home, we found out they were using regular routers, modified with ‘gamer-bait’ visual accents,” he said.
When a user starts a game, he said that the hardware on the PC gaming communicates with the router and tells the router to treat the gaming packets special and with high priority. If the network is bogged down from other users, the router is able to keep the gameplay “fast and smooth” because it prioritises the game traffic above other traffic in the home.
Conversely, he added that the PC also communicates to the router when a less important activity is taking place (like a download) so that the router won’t let the download impact the internet experience of other users in the home.
Bob Grim, vice-president of marketing and business development at Rivet Networks, gamers will have a router that is designed specifically to work with their Killer-enabled PCs to identify and prioritise important gaming network traffic and ensure their online gaming experience is fast and smooth, no matter what else is going on in their home network.
Khan said the MEA gaming is growing 25 per cent year-on-year growth. In the GCC, Saudi Arabia leads the market with 19th rank and $647.42 million in revenues for 2017, followed by 35th placed UAE with revenues of $281.6 million, Kuwait in 54th placed with revenues of $119.1 million and Bahrain at 81st with revenues of $32.93 million.
According to a new report by Newszoo, the MEA gaming market of more than 3.36 million gamers is expected to generate $4 billion of revenue this year, 2.6 per cent share of 2017 global gaming revenues. The global games market will reach a value of $108.9 billion in 2017, of which mobile will take 42 per cent.
