How Much Data Does Online Gaming Use?

How much actual data are players of online games consuming? Will they soon consume all of your available bandwidth? Again, the response is uncomplicated and will undoubtedly fulfill your expectations.

The development of online multiplayer games has been a significant contributor to the industry-wide transformation that has taken place in the gaming sector over the past two decades.

It should come as no surprise that one of the primary factors behind the meteoric rise in popularity of multiplayer games was the continuous improvement in the speed and reliability of internet connections. Of course, LAN parties are a thing of the past today, but despite the significant technical advances, not everyone can access the internet at high speed. As a result, many gamers could have little choice but to make do with a metered connection, even if only briefly.

Which comes up the issue posed in the heading: how much data are contemporary multiplayer games going to consume?

Fortunately, the answer is: not much.

It i” estimated that playing multiplayer games would take around the same amount of data streaming music, approximately 40-100 MB per hour. On the other hand, streaming high-definition video may consume anywhere from 1 gigabyte to 3 gigabytes of data in an hour, while streaming 4K material can consume an astounding 7 gigabytes of data in an hour.

You may have peace of mind knowing that streaming video material will consume more of your data and bandwidth than any game could ever hope to come close to matching. However, the preceding is simply a generalization. Even though playing games are nowhere near as resource-intensive as streaming videos, the amount of data used to play games can still vary widely from one title to the next.

This piece will provide a rundown of the typical amount of data consumed by many popular games in one hour. Check out the chart below to see whether you are using a connection measured in terms of bandwidth use or if you are just forced to make do with less of it.

The numbers mentioned above are, of course, just estimates, as the actual amount of data used will still vary depending on several different variable factors, such as the number of participants in a multiplayer match or a specific region of the map in a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). So, again, these numbers are just approximations.

However, if you are gaming online while utilizing a metered connection and want to ensure that you do not use up all of your data, the best course of action is to try it out on your own.

When it comes to utilizing the internet for gaming, it is evident that bandwidth and connection speed should not be the primary aspects that cause concern. This is because of the considerations that have been discussed above. Instead, stability and latency are typically considerably more significant than throughput.

A stable connection does not frequently fail and does not suffer from abrupt, significant dips in speed or irregular latency. Stability is a pretty self-explanatory concept. As long as your connection is consistent, you won’t have to worry about getting disconnected from the game or experiencing any latency that prevents you from progressing.

Regarding latency, it is typically the single most crucial issue to bear in mind if you want to have a positive experience when participating in a multiplayer activity. Because it is expressed in milliseconds and reflects the time it takes for your computer to interact with the game server, it is simple to understand why this metric would be significant for online gaming.

You are not engaging with other players in a multiplayer game in real time; instead, there is always some degree of delay between your actions and theirs, and this latency can sometimes be significant. So naturally, a reduced latency (preferably under 200 milliseconds) may make this delay almost insignificant in most cases.

On the other hand, as was said earlier, you will feel lag if the latency is too high, and having a high download and upload speed will not assist in this regard. If you are experiencing issues with excessive latency, there are many things you can do to remedy the problem. If you are interested in reading more about this topic, we have an article that goes into more detail.

And with that, we have reached the end of this tutorial. The values provided in this article are not exact; instead, they are estimates and averages based on the fact that it is impossible to accurately predict how much data any given game will end up using per hour because the numbers will invariably change depending on several factors.

In addition, as was previously said, if you are playing using a connection that is metered and you want to make sure that you do not run out of data, it is advisable to test the amount of data that is used by the games that you want to play on your own.