## 1 Introduction  
Network traffic analysis reports have illustrated that gaming is one of the most popular Internet applications, accounting for an estimated 8-10% of total Internet traffic and ranking as the third biggest traffic source after video streaming and web applications, including social media [1; 2; 3]. Another report highlights that 92.3% of Internet users access the Internet using mobile phones, with gaming being the most common use for these devices [4]. Given that game servers are typically hosted in cloud data centers and that game service providers incur significant costs for network traffic, understanding mobile game traffic patterns is crucial, not only from an engineering viewpoint but also from a business perspective. As mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, have become the prevailing service environment for the gaming industry, game genres that run on mobile devices have also become diverse and complicated. In the early era of networked mobile gaming in the 2010s, most mobile games were asynchronous due to the poor robustness and high cost of mobile networks. In these games, players could interact with other players, such as family members and friends, but they generally played independently rather than tightly together. On the other hand, today's mobile network technology, especially in metropolitan areas, has significantly improved in connection stability. A recent survey showed that from October 2022 through March 2023, 5G and 4G networks in the UK exhibited 98.4% and 97.8% connection success rates on average, respectively, when a mobile device becomes active [5]. This suggests that mobile games enjoy much more robust network connectivity,even in the mobile network, and thus such games now rely more on a persistent network connection to the game server. This phenomenal change suggests that the current underlying network traffic patterns might differ from those of the 2010s and from those in the PC gaming environment. This paper illustrates traffic analysis from two mobile games with global service. The analyzed games represent opposite extremes in terms of their genre. One is strongly synchronized and a massive multiplayer game similar to that of a PC environment, but with an \"auto-hunt\" feature to allow gameplay without human engagement. The other is less synchronized and primarily played by a single player, although it also features social interactions among players. The primary contribution of our work is demonstrating that recent mobile games exhibit traffic patterns akin to those in PC games, particularly regarding packet length and inter-packet arrival times, but have differences regarding traffic self-similarity. Our analysis of the games' traffic traces reveals that current mobile games typically feature notably short inter-packet arrival times, similar to traditional multiplayer games in the PC environment, accompanied by a long-tail distribution due to the intermittent sleep and resume nature of mobile applications. Concerning packet lengths, recent mobile games predominantly use shorter packets, favoring them over aggregated larger packets to conserve network bandwidth. These patterns, observed consistently across different game genres, suggest that modern mobile games are developed with expectations of reliable network connectivity, a notable shift from earlier in the 2010s. This consistency in traffic characteristics, irrespective of game genre, underscores a fundamental similarity in network usage between contemporary mobile and PC gaming platforms. Our analysis, however, discovered that the presence of self-similarity in traffic patterns, identified by previous research on PC online games' traffic patterns, varies across game genres. This finding encourages further research to model mobile game traffic. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews research related to the mobile gaming industry. Section 3 briefly introduces the mobile games analyzed and explains the methods for collecting and anonymizing traffic data.