The best VPN for gaming

We’ve seen what you need from a gaming VPN, but is this even something you need for your favorite online adventure or shoot ‘em up?

The answer is, it all depends. One of the most common questions people have about VPNs and gaming is whether it will improve your ping times. That is, the speed, measured in milliseconds, that your PC can send data to the game’s servers. VPNs can’t really help here since it adds another connection point between you and your destination server. Instead of going from your PC to the game server and back, it goes from your PC to the VPN server to the game server and back. In most cases you will probably find that ping times either worsen or stay about the same.

Either way, it’s a rare case where ping times are helped by a VPN. The one exception might be stability. In these instances, your bare internet connection isn’t stable enough due to a high amount of activity in your neighborhood, or heavy load on your home network. In those cases, a VPN might make things a little more stable since you connection runs through a VPN server that specializes in keeping things moving.

That brings us to the next topic of potential ISP throttling. We’re not talking about the nefarious kind where your service provider might try to charge you extra for access to gaming servers. Instead, we’re talking about everyday traffic shaping, as well as penalizing bandwidth hogs (you) for taking up too much bandwidth at peak times.

Again in those cases a VPN may help. It all depends on how closely your ISP is monitoring your activity. If it’s slowing down your connection to a specific server and prioritizing other traffic, then a VPN will most likely help. If, however, you’re getting penalized for being too much of a bandwidth hog, the ISP will still see larger amounts of bandwidth and penalize you on that basis.

If your favorite time to play is 7PM at night, and that’s a high traffic time, a VPN might help.

Another reason people love a VPN is for getting around geo-blocking restrictions. For the most part this is a bad idea or unnecessary for gaming. Many games already let you change regions freely, while others will only let you switch every few weeks. In those instances where you can’t switch regions, and you want to try getting around geographic restrictions, keep in mind that your gameplay experience may not be that great. On top of that, you may be violating the games terms of service, setting yourself up for a ban. That goes for playing games and trying to get access to games early, as well as accessing DLC that isn’t available where you are. It’s up to you, but keep in mind there are risks to getting around geo restrictions in games. Plus game networks like Steam don’t like this kind of activity, and the only thing worse than getting penalized by a game would be getting penalized by Steam.

One final issue is if you are playing a game that uses a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server setup. These games aren’t as common as they once were, but the fear here is that someone will find your IP address and try to kick you offline with a denial-of-service attack. A VPN would definitely help with that, and if you’re experiencing something you think might be a DDoS then you could try playing with a VPN to see if it helps.

There is no set number of servers that make one VPN better than another. While VPN providers will often advertise the number of servers they have, this is largely a marketing gimmick and doesn’t really equate to the quality of the VPN service itself. Things such as server location spread and server quality are as important if not more so than the quantity of available servers.

That being said, most of the major VPN providers offer between 3,000 to 5,000 or more servers. We recommend that you avoid any paid service under 1,000 servers as this may be an indication that the company is not yet well established, which could lead to reliability issues.

In short, yes, a VPN can have an effect on your internet speeds. But nowadays it’s the exception rather than the norm.

When you connect to a VPN, it re-routes your traffic through its own servers. Depending on where these servers are located, it can add extra distance for your traffic to travel to and from, leading to a higher ping. Also, VPNs encrypt your data, which can lead to slower download and upload speeds due to the time it takes to encrypt and decrypt your data—this can affect everything from page load times to video buffering speeds. Thankfully, advances in encryption technology and server optimization by modern VPN providers have lessened these impacts significantly.