The vilification of gaming in the media is never ending, and even now, during the Coronavirus Pandemic and the often mandatory quarantines being enacted around the world, news outlets out there are still trying to find ways to attack gamers and their hobby as the source of some kind of problem — in this case, claims that online gaming is “The Biggest Threat To Internet Bandwidth” in the next few weeks.
I learned of this from a tweet share to me by Prince Watercress (as always) made by some actor I’ve never heard of where he shares the above sentiment. While many are giving him hell over sharing the sentiment, he isn’t the originator of it — apparently, best I can tell by searching the exact phrasing of the best I can find is some Daily Mail post regarding such (we all know that’s a SUPER reliable “news” source after all, but other outlets, all still UK / British Isles based, seem to be sharing similar articles with similar information, give or take — the idea that gamers should wait until hours where workers won’t be doing jobs from home so that bandwidth is available for them to do their jobs. This coming from someone who’s touted in the Dailymail post on this as a “games expert” but not given any name or credentials (how convenient.)
Any look at the comments of these posts, tweets related to such, or any other kind of discussion shows a big problem with this claim though; one that should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about how this stuff works: Online gaming actually uses very little bandwidth. This is especially bad when one quickly compares (as so many in the comments do) the modest kiolbytes or at most, megabytes at a time that a given online game may have going back and forth compared to the gigabytes that any given HD video stream (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube, it doesn’t matter) would use by comparison in the same time period.
Unless you’re referring to “streamingbro” gamers who are still obsessed with the failure that is Google Stadia and the idea of cloud gaming, no, online gamers are using a fraction of the raw available bandwidth in any given area – if I had to guess at most possibly 1/100th of the bandwidth of just one person watching a film on Netflix over the same time period! That’s presuming a 2 hour watching of a normal HD video — things grow even more if they are watching a 4K film, but the data used for an online Call of Duty or Fortnite marathon? Hardly anything by comparison. Even game updates, once they are done, are done — they aren’t constantly pulling gigabytes every hour you play the game, as opposed to streaming services which are.
If bandwidth is truly a concern, then target the actual hogs of such — Streaming Video. Don’t blame gamers for a problem they didn’t create and would suffer from as much as the telecommuting workers this whole subject is supposed to be helping. Of course, with regard to posts such as the tweet from the actor, I’d not expect them to go against media streaming since that’s their business and beneficial for them to keep going — get those movies seen, make those royalties, right? Bias at its finest there, but I digress…
Don’t pull this kind of shit — the world needs gaming just as much as it needs any other entertainment service out there right now as we try to survive a fucking global pandemic.
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