I spent a full week testing different VPNs and I’m changing my no-VPNs-while-gaming advice
A PC Gamer reviewer has reassessed their longstanding advice against using VPNs while gaming after conducting an extended testing period with multiple VPN services. The author, who previously recommended avoiding VPNs due to concerns about increased latency affecting competitive gaming performance, discovered that some VPN providers actually delivered lower ping times compared to playing without a VPN active.
The testing revealed that modern VPN services have evolved sufficiently to potentially eliminate the traditional performance trade-off gamers faced. Rather than being forced to toggle VPNs on and off or manually configure split tunneling for each game installation, players may now be able to maintain continuous VPN protection without sacrificing the low latency required for competitive play.
This finding has significant implications for gaming privacy and security practices. Gamers can potentially maintain their personal data protection while gaming, rather than being forced to choose between privacy and performance. The results suggest that VPN technology has matured to the point where it may no longer represent an automatic compromise for competitive players.