I. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we propose a remote gaming system in which a user does not have to download and install any games to PCs, tablets, phones or other devices. Instead, the user can just start playing a game from a server over the Internet, and essentially just streams the video content to the thin-client device. The controls to the game, of course, remain at the user, who can use a touch screen or an external gamepad to play the game. The remote gaming concept has been analyzed earlier especially from the viewpoint of latency which is very important from the viewpoint of quality of experience. However, the energy aspects have not been thoroughly investigated in the literature. We argue that remote gaming can save energy of the device of the user, which is important especially with mobile devices with limited battery lifetime. As a key contribution of this publication we show that this is especially true for games requiring 3D rendering and multi-player games that keep the power hungry wireless network interface active all the time. At the flip side of the coin, the approach can have many benefits for game companies. For them, one motivation for
“Mobile Cloud Gaming” or “Gaming as a Service” [1] type of remote gaming solutions is that to protect their games against software piracy. Storing all the game state at the server side can be beneficial from a game cheating prevention perspective. The approach provides a more centralized and rapid way of upgrading the games. As the user does not have to download the game software at all, it is also easier to provide free shortterm trials to attract users to try out new games. The game companies can potentially use more homogeneous platforms for developing games. Storing and publishing of game sessions becomes easier since the game video is already rendered at the server, and little effort would be required to push the recorded session to some gaming video service.