How much data does mobile gaming consume?

Mobile gaming has been growing in popularity with its low barrier to entry and portability. Games such as Mobile Legends, PUBG Mobile, and the newer Call Of Duty Mobile are all online multiplayer games that consume data when playing. To help these mobile gamers, telcos offer 1GB data promos, and some even add data allocation for gaming like Smart’s Giga promos. Are these promos enough to satisfy your gaming needs? Today we investigated how much data each game consumes.

Author’s note: Because of the nature of multiplayer games, no two games are exactly alike. Hence, getting an exact figure would be close to impossible. The data usage should, however, give you a ballpark figure of how much data each game consumes. Also, because we don’t have a spare iPhone to test on, we used an Android device for all testing.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

Starting off with the most popular mobile MOBA game in the market, we tested 1 game of Mobile Legends on the Classic game mode. We initially thought that the main menu animations, events, and promos were going to eat up a lot of data, but fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Loading the game to the main menu, we saw the game use only 1.6MB of data.

After a 15 minute game on the Classic game mode with the “Speed Mode” turned on, Mobile Legends consumed 25.5MB of data. This by far consumed the most data in the three games tested.

PUBG Mobile

1 year since its release, PUBG Mobile is still topping Google Play’s charts as one of the most downloaded games. Since the map is so huge and there are lots of other players, we expect a little bit of variance when it comes to mobile data usage. Loading into the lobby, PUBG Mobile consumed  3.1MB of data.

We tested the game on the Erangel map, getting the chicken dinner to maximize playtime. After one full game on Erangel that lasted around 20 minutes, we saw that the game used up 6.2MB of data which is not bad for a 20-minute match.

Call Of Duty Mobile

One of the newer popular first-person shooters is Call Of Duty mobile. Because there are several game modes to play, and game times vary depending on how well each team is playing, there’s some variance in terms of data consumption. Loading into the main menu, the game consumed 3.5MB of data.

Call of Duty matches is quicker than other games since the 40 kill limit is easy to achieve so we expect low data consumption in this game. After playing a 10 minute round of Team Deathmatch on the Raid map, the game consumed 3.2MB of data.

For the three games tested, here’s a compiled list of data consumption:

After seeing the data consumption of three different games, we see that 1GB of data is more than enough for playing these games for days. Mobile Legends consumed the most data, but still only consumed 25MB per game. With most telcos offering 1GB data for around PHP 50USD 0.85INR 72EUR 0.81CNY 6, you will need to play more than 30 games or a little less than 10 hours before you consume all your data. As for PUBG and COD Mobile, you can play over 150 games or over 52 hours before you reach your data limit.

There you have it! A list of data consumption of three popular mobile games in the Play Store today. What other games would you like us to test? Let us know in the comments below!