Do you want to know how much data does gaming use?
Gamers are often curious about how much data gaming use. This is because most gamers don’t know its answer. For this reason, they think gaming uses most of their data. But what’s the truth? Is playing games responsible for most of your data usage? You will get to know everything throughout the article.
Games Don’t Consume a Lot of Data
You may have heard people blaming gamers for high data consumption. For instance, if someone watching Netflix or other online videos and facing buffering issue. In such cases, gamers are blamed. They think due to gaming, they are facing this buffering issue.
But this is far from the truth. Because gaming usually does not require that much data. Games consume much less data than other activities. Moreover, if you play small single-player games, then the data usage is even less.
Data Usage For Popular Games
Game Average Data Consumption Per Hour
GTA V Online 60MB
League of Legends 45MB
Dota 2 120MB
Team Fortress 2 80MB
Call of Duty: World War II 40MB
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 80MB
Overwatch 130MB
Minecraft 50MB-180MB
Fortnite 100MB
Destiny 2 300MB
World of Warcraft 50MB
Diabolic 3 (multiplayer) 36MB
You can see in the above-given table that even the most popular multiplayer games don’t use that much data, let alone small games. Although, the data usage can vary if you use voice chat to communicate or use a service such as Discord. Even then, it will not increase data consumption that much. Now you know how much data it takes to play games. It’s time to see the data consumption for other activities such as watching Netflix and streaming online music.
Data Usage For Other Activities
Activities Average Data Consumption Per Hour
Online Music Streaming 100MB/hour
Online gaming 300MB/hour
Video conferencing 800MB/hour
Streaming Netflix SD 2GB/hour
Streaming Netflix HD 4GB/hour
Streaming Netflix 4k 7GB/hour
You can see the above table and understand that media consumption uses far more data as compared to playing online games. Even simple task as streaming music uses more data than many games. Even if you stream video on low quality it will take far more data than gaming. So next time if someone blames you for high data usage, you know what to say. So that they can understand, they should not blame gaming for high data consumption.
Also, read Packet Loss in Gaming – Understand and Fix it Easily.
How to Save Data While Playing Games?
At this moment you understand that games don’t use that much data. Still, I will give you some tips that will save you some data. These tips can come in handy in you use a low-bandwidth connection.
1. Stop Background Downloads
This is the simplest thing you can do to save data. You just have to stop the resources from downloading in the background. This is because if you don’t do this, it will not just use data but also hinder your gaming experience, as you will not get enough data for smooth gameplay.
2. Don’t Download Resources That You Don’t Use
Games these days are too big compared to the older ones. Another thing is that there are too many features or mods that you don’t use. For this reason, you should download only those resources that you use. This way you will not just save your data, but the overall game file will be smaller(uses less storage).
Wrapping Up
This is all about the amount of data that gaming uses. Here we discussed the most popular mobile games and their data consumption. This goes the same for both mobile games and PC games. I hope you liked the explanation.