Hi,

Internet service providers often have data limits, usually per month. Is this hurting Internet commerce? Is this putting the brakes a little bit on the economy? Is this hurting the online gaming industry?

How can data limits hurt the economy if our eyes aren't real?

How can data limits hurt the economy if our eyes aren't real?

It was a soundstage on mars.

My ISP throttles the connection *ALL THE TIME* .

My connection is in the range of 50kb/s to 600kb/s (( I have *NO* choice in the matter ))

This causes a lot of web sites to time out for me

No data limits here =)

Everytime i threads about connection speeds and limits i get the feeling that the USA is the third world of the internet.

Well, I'm getting 6Mbit/s at most where I live, which is right in the middle of europe

No data limits here. But yeah, DATA limits can severely impact sales for games. It doesn't take long for a game like COD to suddenly get throttled because the ISP is a greedy arse.

Limits of all kinds are a fact of life.

It would be awesome to have unlimited bandwidth at faster-than-light speeds. All assets could be streamed directly from the server the instant they were needed, or even played on the server with the user effectively downloading a video stream of themselves playing. But that is not realistic today.

Right now we live in a world with a wide range of connectivity options. Some people have double-digit kilbobytes per second, some people have double digit megabytes per second. Those are the hands we are dealt.

As game developers we make the best games we can with the conditions we can establish as baseline. If some people discover they cannot play the games based on the reality of their networks, then they are not part of our customer base. We can attempt to accommodate their situation, or not, depending on our own market realities.

How much data are you going to consume per day anyway? 2GB is the standard limit imposed by ISPs in the USA, some have gone beyond 2GB.

2GB / 30 days / 24 hours / 60 mins / 60 secs = ~800 bytes/sec

And that's if you are awake for every single second.

Assuming an 8-hour online activity per day, which is a lot btw, you can consume about ~2.4KB/sec.

Then another question is why would you be gaming on your wireless plan when you can use your faster cable/DSL connections at home/office?