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Games

Housebound Italian Kids Strain Network With Fortnite Marathon (bloomberg.com) 40

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Italy's school shutdown is driving a surge in internet traffic as kids turn to online video games to stave off boredom. From a report: With schools, shops and restaurants closed in an attempt to limit Europe's worst coronavirus outbreak, the amount of data passing through Telecom Italia SpA's national network has surged by more than two-thirds in the past two weeks, the company said. A lot of that extra activity is due to online games such as 'Fortnite' and 'Call of Duty,' which can involve multiple players and take up more bandwidth than the business programs and conference call apps used by adults working from home. Gaming traffic can spike even higher when the games are refreshed and millions of kids download the latest 25-gigabyte update at once. "We reported an increase of more than 70% of Internet traffic over our landline network, with a big contribution from online gaming such as Fortnite," Telecom Italia Chief Executive Officer Luigi Gubitosi said Wednesday on a call with analysts.
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Housebound Italian Kids Strain Network With Fortnite Marathon More

Housebound Italian Kids Strain Network With Fortnite Marathon

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  • Fortnite or other online games consume just a few tens of kilobytes per second, since they only transmit the players' actions. What is more likely is all the Youtube/Netflix/... traffic.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Fortnite regularly has large (25GB in this case) updates.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        And if the ISPs were smart, they'd offer localized caches of these very large static assets. That's at least how Netflix works. Less strain on long-haul networks.

      • What the hell is in these updates to take up that much space? I've purchased entire games recently that take up less space than this and fortnight doesn't exactly seem like the kind of game that's got massive texture files. I've purchased DLCs with new missions, units, maps, and loads of other content that only take a few hundred MB, so either they've got some incredibly shoddy practices or I'm missing something.

        • Re:Fortnite, really? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @02:54PM (#59827330)

          This article seems to be full of misleading information. I searched just a bit, and while the initial download is 25GB, patches are apparently much smaller than that, like 1GB or so. Maybe a regular Fortnite player can let us know if that's the case.

          The bandwidth claims also make no sense. From what I can gather, you'd need to play Fortnite literally ALL DAY to hit about 1GB of data. That's going to be easily eclipsed by someone streaming a single movie on Netflix (1GB to 7GB per hour, depending on resolution).

        • This is what you get when you try to write a whole fucking application in fucking Python. theres no reason for these games to be more than maybe a gig if coded in sane programming languages.

          • I'm not sure if you're aware, but games have gotten prettier over the last few decades, and it turns out that high resolution textures and models take up quite a bit of storage even when compressed.

          • The vast majority of videogames, Fortnite include, are written in C++, not Python. And the size of the downloads are mostly due to assets such as high-res textures, videos, models, animations, sounds, voice, and so on.. not code.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Wolfrider ( 856 )

          --I've played games on the PS4 that downloaded a whole new game as soon as you put in the disc. That's just disrespectful of people's bandwidth - what they need to be doing is differential patches, and distributing new DISCS. Anything over about 5GB is just a waste, and the doing of lazy-ass programmers.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Not to mention twitch streaming Fortnight.

    • Re:Fortnite, really? (Score:4, Funny)

      by rho ( 6063 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @12:19PM (#59826704) Journal

      ...

      It's porn. The ellipses means porn.

    • Plus the info from literally every single player in the game.

      • In games like these, it's pretty typical that only other players in your immediate vicinity are broadcast to your local client. A client doesn't need to know about other players they can't normally detect in-game. Game developers specifically do this not just to cut down on traffic, but to prevent a particularly simple vector for cheating.

    • But they told me video games are the main cause for violence, ADHD, and Coronavirus?
  • It should also be noted that the timing of Call of Duty Warzone was probably a bad call. The ISP networking folks I've talked to have had more issues around day 1-2 of these massive dumps some games are taking on bandwidth for updates the last couple years.

  • Battle royale games not working on a busy network?

    Try a local co-op game!

    Just bored and want something nicely involved to expand your perspective?

    Try story-focused single player games!

    There's a bunch of great ones available fully-free right now, or free in ways basically everyone in that age range knows already anyway too.

    A Short Hike is a lovely little game that you can get for free now - it's on the Epic store along with two others also free.

    Expand your horizons - be like the Internet, and route around da

  • Dear Gen Z,
    Pick a better game. That one sucks.

    • Fortnite is fun. Changing and modifying the playing field makes it interesting and presents its own challenges. The variety of ever changing player models and emotes helps keep it from going stale.

      It also has an emphasis on dance, which requires physical fitness in order to perform. I'm too busy to look it up right now, but I wonder how many dance teams this game has inspired.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @01:00PM (#59826894)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I play if you online games and they use very very little bandwidth. Like Netflix would use an order of magnitude more. Can someone please comment on how much fortnite actually uses I have trouble believing thatâ(TM)s the cause of the problem.

  • no school? (Score:3)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @02:28PM (#59827228)

    Why aren't these kids in virtual classrooms continuing with school? All the Chinese kids are attending school remotely without interruption but Europeans can't manage it?

    • They are. But school is not 24 hours a day. Fortnite has replaced all the afternoon sport, playing and hanging around with friends.
      • HAH you think kids these days actually play afternoon sports and physically hang with friends any more? They're always attached to their phones. playing games or more likely playing with the latest social media fad of the quarter.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I must say those little bastards are quite good too!

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