It is quiet known fact that the primary purpose of VPNs is to provide security for almost anything that requires an internet connection, including playing games online.
Some people don’t deem it necessary to use a VPN while playing games; however, its use is highly recommended as maintaining privacy is crucial over the internet.
The bare-minimum features that a gaming VPN server should have are; a reliable connection in which speed isn’t compromised, along with worldwide server access. One should keep in mind that VPN gaming doesn’t just provide security or anonymity; it has a good chunk of other benefits that we’re going to explore here.
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Provides Security on Public WiFi
The digital era of today works heavily on the internet and its availability and accessibility, which makes it a prerequisite for every place to have WiFi. Using these public wifis paves the way for anyone to see your data. We often get stuck in a spot waiting for someone, and to kill our time, we start playing games on our devices using public WiFi.
It is essential to cover your bases with the help of a VPN before connecting to a public WiFi to play games in order to protect your data. It is common knowledge that your data isn’t encrypted by a public network, regardless of password protection. Furthermore, hackers are also given a pathway to block your online presence and activity along with installing viruses on your device – all under your nose.
Avoids Bandwidth Throttling
This brings us to the concept of throttling – this happens when too much data is on your network, causing congestion. Now using a VPN for gaming can assist you with throttling disrupting your gaming.
Different games use different amounts of data per hour to function correctly on your device, and one can quickly reach a data cap when playing games for several hours per day. This slowing down of your internet service provider (ISP) and reaching data caps can be easily combated with the help of VPNs. They encrypt your data, tricking your ISP into not being able to differentiate between you playing a game or browsing the web.
Protection against Swatting
Playing games on the internet involves interacting with all kinds of people, including those gamers who get angry at their opponents and resort to stalking other players online. Although this rarely happens, one should always be cautious – VPN helps prevent these kinds of people from tracking down your location and hiding your IP address. It also helps prevent swatting – an aggressive type of harassment in which they send emergency services to your home.
Provides Access to Banned Games
It might sound bizarre, but some countries even ban video games due to the nature of the game or disturbing content. Countries like the UK, Germany, Australia, China, Russia ban violent or irreverent games, and this ban leads to censorships, resulting in the geo-restriction of some games. VPNs can help you access these games by connecting you to a server in another country where the said game isn’t banned.
Play from Anywhere
Geo-restriction doesn’t only come with banned games; it also happens when games have not been released in the whole world; that’s why some online games try to connect you to a server in your region. So these relatively new games are often trendy, and servers have to be put in multiple areas to deal with the plethora of connections.
It is also known that new games rarely are ever released worldwide, so one can’t even get excited about a game releasing, if it’s not released in their location.
So to connect with other gamers in different areas and access newly released games unavailable in your area, geo-restriction will become a hurdle, but having premium VPNs will prevent this from happening due to their servers’ existence in multiple regions.
Prevention from DDoS Attacks
Just like swatting, another attack that you can be exposed to if you don’t have a VPN is a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service) – in this, an immense number of requests are sent from compromised computers to a single system in order to force it offline. Back in the day, DDoS was mainly given out to websites and rarely online games.
But now, with the world moving forward at an incredible pace, this DDoS software is readily available, so just like swatting, any of your angry opponents can DDoS you. So in cases like this, having a VPN helps tremendously, as your IP address stays hidden, so DDoS won’t work as your connection wouldn’t be found to send unnecessary requests.
These are some of the said benefits of using a VPN for online gaming; make sure you enjoy all these.
