Are online games really that greedy?
How much data do they "use" anyway? Should we be careful?
For the past few years, mobile data transfer is no longer something you should pay much attention to. Most operators already offer a substantial number of gigabytes in their basic packages, and paying extra for possible larger needs is not something that would seriously hurt the family budget. Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the most popular activities lately is online gaming.
From the computer world, we are used to the fact that games are the ones that need the most powerful devices and that, due to the demanding graphics, they are also extremely data intensive. But what about mobile or streaming online games? These run at high resolutions and speeds, so you'd expect them to be quite data-hungry. Are they really? Do we need to be more careful than, say, streaming music or watching movies? Let's take a look at how much data individual streaming activities require.
If you stream music over the Internet, you will use an average of 100 MB per hour, video conferences will "cost" you an average of 200 MB per hour, if you go "to the extreme" and watch movies on Netflix online in HD quality, around 3 GB per hour.
What about games? Of course, these differ from each other, but real data shows that they are actually less greedy than you might expect. In the table below, where some of the most popular online streaming games are collected, we see that they require from 50 to 300 MB per hour, which is really not that much considering the content. But it is still necessary to be careful. First of all, because an hour of gameplay goes by in the blink of an eye, but also because many of these games require a significant amount of data to be downloaded upon installation. Some examples - Overwatch 35 GB, Apex Legends 42 GB, Call of Duty: Warzone a whopping 105 GB. These are quantities that are definitely not wise to transfer via mobile data transfer.
So - if the installation data is transferred via a classic wired or wireless network, and we play here and there via mobile, there is no need to worry about the amount of data transferred.
Source: Fossbytes
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