One of the biggest pitfalls of streaming a video game

Recently I stumbled into a problem with using gaming streaming. That is the amount of data that is being downloaded can easily go over your internet service provider's data cap. Last month I had longer sessions testing on Google stadia and my PC. Halfway through the month, I was notified by COX that my download usage was 75% used and if I were to go over I would have to be charged an extra $10 per 50Gbs. I was confused by that as I have never seen this alert. So I went into my Wifi settings to see how much data is being downloaded and that was where it hit me. When using a gaming streaming service you are constantly downloading full videogames data over the internet. Roughly I was downloading roughly 21GB per hour to play destiny 2 on Stadia and on my PC I was downloading roughly 500MB. The reason why it's so low running on my PC is that all the levels/textures were already stored locally, I didn't have to constantly be downloading an entire game to play. With this new information, I can see how video game streaming can be more expensive if you typically play games frequently. Though this is a negative I think that Internet service providers need to remove data caps. Even without streaming videogame, I can see large families hitting their data caps from everyone watching moves/tv on their own devices.




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