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Online gaming is often blamed for using up a lot of data, and slowing down everyone else's connection because of how much speed it needs. In reality, though, online gaming uses much less Internet than an HD Netflix stream.
The exact amount of data will vary depending on the game, but playing a game online uses less data than many other common activities. The most data-heavy games use somewhere in the realm of 300MB per hour, but many other games use 100MB per hour or less.
To put this in perspective, here's how an hour of data-intensive gaming compares to other online activities:
Activity | Data use |
---|---|
Streaming music | ~100MB/hr |
Online gaming | 300MB/hr |
Group video conferencing | 800MB/hr |
Streaming HD Netflix | 3GB/hr |
So you won't be able to get as many hours of gaming out of your data as you would if you were streaming tunes, but it's really not a huge amount of data comparatively. Keep in mind that 300MB/hr figure is on the heavier end of the scale - most games won't even come close to using this much.
While it depends on the game, here are some approximate data figures for a few popular games:
Game | Data use |
---|---|
Fortnite | 50MB/hr |
Overwatch | 100MB/hr |
Team Fortress 2 | 80MB/hr |
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare | 80MB/hr |
League of Legends | 50MB/hr |
Counter Strike: Global Offensive | 250MB/hr |
DotA 2 | 120MB/hr |
In contrast to playing a game, the actual process of installing a game – downloading it, patching it and installing extra content – can use up an extraordinary amount of data. Some game files can reach 90GB or more in size, though this is hardly the norm. The vast majority will be smaller if you play on consoles like the Nintendo Switch (most less than 10GB).
Here's the file size of some common games on PC:
Thankfully, nearly all NBN plans these days come with unlimited data so you shouldn't have to worry about how much data you're consuming from your online gaming.
Gaming itself uses very little data when you're actually playing, somewhere between 20-100MB/hr in most cases.
Streaming, on the other hand, can chew through loads and loads of data, all the way up to about 7GB at 4K resolution. This depends on a number of factors including:
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