It’s not unusual to turn on a console and be greeted by a screen of pending downloads for games you have installed. It happened to me today. Several games needed updating, meaning hundreds of gigabytes of data to download. This didn’t particularly bother me. I have an uncapped and relatively speedy internet connection. My primary concerns were exactly how long it would take and how much hard-drive space it would require. What effect all that data would have passing through the network didn’t occur to me. I couldn’t see it so I wasn’t thinking about it.
Do you have any idea how much internet data you use a month? I found this surprisingly hard to find. In a subsection of my TalkTalk account I found a graph charting the last seven days of my internet use, and it told me I used approximately 109GB of data. That seems neither high nor low to me as someone who writes about games and works from home. I could easily increase it.
When I turned my PlayStation 5 on recently, I was prompted to download a 60GB Ghost of Tsushima patch, a 55GB Cyberpunk 2077 patch, and a few smaller others. Letting those run would have doubled my use. Or I could have simply downloaded Call of Duty: Warzone, like millions of other people, which is 103GB on its own (not to mention the chunky updates it periodically rolls out), and doubled it that way. The point being: it’s not hard to gobble up lots of data playing games in 2021.