Gone are the days of LAN parties where you had to lug around bulky PCs with CRT monitors in order to play state-of-the-art multiplayer games. With the advent of online multiplayer games, LAN parties have become a thing of the past. However, not every gamer has access to high bandwidth internet, which begs the question: how much data do modern multiplayer games require? The answer is not much, but it does vary depending on the game.
On average, playing online multiplayer games uses about as much internet as streaming music, which is between 40 and 100 megabytes per hour. However, modern games can require much more data than this. To put it into perspective, streaming HD video uses up between 1 and 3 gigabytes of data per hour, while 4K streaming could require up to 7 gigabytes of data per hour.
When it comes to playing online games, there are many factors to consider. For example, Fortnite, Battlefield 5, League of Legends, and Smite all require 100 megabytes of data per hour. Meanwhile, Dota 2 requires 120 megabytes per hour, while Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Destiny 2 use 250 and 300 megabytes per hour, respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, card games like Hearthstone and Gwent require only three and five megabytes of data per hour, respectively.
It’s important to note that stability and latency tend to be more important than bandwidth and connection speed when it comes to playing online games. If your internet connection isn’t stable, your gameplay experience will be erratic and laden with latency. Even if your connection speed is stable, you may still have high latency due to external factors, such as being situated far away from the server.
While online gaming is not as data costly as video streaming, it’s still important to keep an eye on your data usage and turn off any background processes that could eat away at your finite data. Updates are the worst offenders when it comes to data usage. Just having access to ample data does not guarantee a smooth gameplay experience.
In any case, playing games online does not require a lot of data, so it’s not something you’ll have to swear off of in case you have to switch to a metered connection. Just remember to turn off updates if you don’t want all of your data disappearing overnight.