Gamers
An online match uses very little data. What fills up a data plan is never the game itself: it's downloads. That distinction changes everything, and it's a two-minute fix.
The figures on this page are telecom operator measurements: no publisher releases an official number, and actual usage varies with the number of players and the server's refresh rate. Throttled behavior, on the other hand, was measured on our own servers, with production's exact settings.
The breakdown by game
| Game | In-game traffic | Hours with 50 GB |
|---|---|---|
| Diablo IV | 20 MB/h | 2 500 h |
| Minecraft | 40 MB/h | 1 250 h |
| Rocket League | 40 MB/h | 1 250 h |
| League of Legends | 45 MB/h | 1 100 h |
| GTA Online | 60 MB/h | 830 h |
| Fortnite | 100 MB/h | 500 h |
| Call of Duty: Warzone | 160 MB/h | 310 h |
| Apex Legends | 200 MB/h | 250 h |
| Counter-Strike 2 | 250 MB/h | 200 h |
| Valorant | 250 MB/h | 200 h |
A player on Valorant two hours a day, voice chat included, uses 17 GB a month: a third of the quota. These figures are telecom operator measurements: no publisher releases an official number, and actual usage varies with the number of players and the server's refresh rate.
Two minutes of setup
Leave Steam, Epic, Battle.net, the Riot client, and the Xbox app outside the tunnel. A single Fortnite install weighs 71 GB, and a Call of Duty season patch hit 175 GB in January 2026: if your downloads go through the VPN, they will drain your plan on their own. The simplest way is to download your games with the tunnel closed: outside the tunnel, those gigabytes do not count against your plan. Open it again when you play.
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Three uses we'd rather rule out right away than let you discover the hard way: cloud gaming, which uses up to 30 GB per hour in 4K and so does not fit within a metered plan; extended Twitch or YouTube viewing through the tunnel, which hits the cap in about thirty hours; and heavy torrent downloading, which exhausts a plan in one night. NodeCove isn't built for that, and we'd rather say so before you pay than after.
Beyond the quota
We cut nothing off and we charge no overage fees. We slow down, in stages: a simple email at 45 GB, throughput reduced to 10 Mbit/s at 50 GB, then to 1 Mbit/s at 60 GB. This last tier is the most severe you can reach, and it's the one that matters to you: the question isn't whether it hampers a download, it's built to, but whether it stops you from playing.
We measured it rather than assumed it. An online match uses very little bandwidth: the heaviest game in this table needs only 0.6 Mbit/s, a bit more than half of what the strongest throttle tier allows through. On our test bench, on our own servers and with production's exact settings, every game listed above runs at 1 Mbit/s with zero packet loss and not a millisecond of added latency. In other words: even at maximum throttling, you can still play.
The one caveat, because it exists: if you download at the same time as you play, through the tunnel and under throttling, the game's response time increases by 25 to 36 ms. The match still holds up, but it's no longer comfortable, one more reason to keep game stores out of the tunnel. Only a very detailed flight simulator, which alone needs more than 1.5 Mbit/s for scenery, loads more slowly under the strong tier.
In-game
Your address is replaced by the city's. In competitive play, a visible address is an attack vector for flooding. Your opponents see our server's address, not your line's.
Your provider can no longer sort your traffic. Some networks slow down gaming or downloads at peak hours. Inside an encrypted tunnel, there's no longer a traffic type to tell apart, so nothing left to selectively slow down.
You choose your city, and therefore your route. Cities on five continents: you try the one that gives the best response time to the server you're playing on. Switching takes a few seconds.
It gets through where networks cut off VPNs. Student housing, corporate network, hotel, countries that filter: stealth mode doesn't show the signature these networks look for. You keep your access on the move.
✕ We do not sell store bypassing
Some VPNs invite you to switch countries to pay less for a game. We don't do that, and we advise against it: Steam's subscriber agreement forbids using a proxy to hide your place of residence, and provides for termination of account access. Losing your library to save a few euros is a bad trade, and we're not going to push you into it to sell a subscription.
That's all there is to remember: keep the stores out of the tunnel, and 50 GB leaves you hundreds of hours of play.
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