Let’s get the answer out of the way right up front: No, it can’t. But do you know why that is?
Kill Screen Daily’s Lannick Lejacq does. He says it’s because gaming traffic barely contributes to the overall amount of data flowing across the world’s servers. Even when game files are being downloaded after a high-profile release, the traffic generated isn’t nearly enough to threaten the overall integrity of the internet as a whole.
No, what really takes up all the bandwidth is video-streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. In the States, anyway – Lejacq’s article says that at its peak, online streaming counts for over 60 percent of all US internet traffic, thanks to the fact that 38% of all Americans now use those services on a regular basis. That’s over 121 million people, far more than play games.
Lejacq says that gaming, while big, just isn’t big enough to make a dent. Not even online gaming generates much; according to his sources it apparently doesn’t take a lot of data to co-ordinate a game of Battlefield 4, for instance, even with a full 64-player roster going hell for leather on Operation Metro 2014. At peak times, gaming generates a paltry 3.4 percent of all internet traffic, an amount twenty times less than video streaming does at its peak.
The entire article is fascinating to read, as it goes into quite a bit of depth about the whole thing. I’ve summed it up as best I could above, but for even more juicy details, head over to Kill Screen Daily now and give the full article a good read.
[Source – Kill Screen Daily, Image – Shutterstock]
