In a world where we’ve grown accustomed to instant gratification, a slow internet connection can be more than just a nuisance for gamers. Eyeballing the progress bar of your latest download, heavy with the promise of glitch fixes and new features can feel like a lifetime when all you want to do is play. But, do you know how many hours of your life you’ve wasted waiting, and impatiently watching, your updates download?
Optimum wanted to work out exactly how much time we’ve spent waiting for our games to refresh, update and fix, and how this varies according to your internet speed. From Read Dead to Final Fantasy, what are the most download-friendly games? View the findings in full, including the real-life time equivalent, on Optimum.
How fast it takes to update your games, according to your internet speed
Whether your internet is the flashiest fibre broadband or more of a slow and steady connection, the rate at which your latest update will take depends entirely on your internet speed. Looking at some of the most popular video games, including Call of Duty and The Witcher III, here’s how long you’ve had to wait for all of the game updates (since release) to download in order to play:
| Game | Original game size | No. of updates since release | Total size of updates since release | Time taken to download at 1mb/s | Time taken to download at 50mb/s | Time taken to download at 100mb/s | Time taken to download at 1gb/s |
| Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare | 175 GB | 26 | 542 GB | 180.6 hours | 3.6 hours | 1.8 hours | 10.8 mins |
| Final Fantasy 15 | 107 GB | 30 | 110.24 GB | 36.7 hours | 44 mins | 22 mins | 2.2 mins |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops III | 74.2 GB | 33 | 83.67 GB | 27.8 hours | 33.4 mins | 16.7 mins | 1.6 mins |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 60 GB | 24 | 68.29 GB | 22.7 hours | 27.3 mins | 13.6 mins | 1.3 mins |
| Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare | 100 GB | 25 | 59.41 GB | 19.8 hours | 23.7 mins | 11.8 mins | 1.1 mins |
| The Witcher III | 30 GB | 32 | 49.5 GB | 16.5 hours | 19.8 mins | 9.9 mins | 49 seconds |
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare stands out as the largest game in the study, it’s updates are 375% bigger than the next biggest game, Final Fantasy 15. With this in mind, if your internet speed is just 1mb/s, you’ve probably wasted about 180.6 hours of your time – that’s 7.5 days – waiting for the updates since the game launched in October 2019.
Comparing this against the smallest game in the study, The Witcher III, the current game size (inclusive of all updates) is 49.5 GB, meaning a 1mb/s connection would still take 16.5 hours to download.
How far you could have run whilst waiting for game downloads
So, what else could we have done with our time whilst these games updated? Looking at average update times for each of the games in the study across internet speeds (1mb/s, 100mb/s, 500mb/s and 1gb/s) here’s how many miles and marathons you could have run:
| Game | Total size of updates since release | Average time to download all updates across internet speeds | Miles you could’ve run whilst waiting | How many marathons you could’ve run whilst waiting |
| Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare | 542 GB | 46.5 hours | 279.27 miles | 10.65 marathons |
| Final Fantasy 15 | 110.24 GB | 9.4 hours | 56.75 miles | 2.16 marathons |
| Call of Duty – Black Ops III | 83.67 GB | 7.1 hours | 42.99 miles | 1.64 marathons |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 68.29 GB | 5.8 hours | 35.1 miles | 1.34 marathons |
| Call of Duty – Infinite Warfare | 59.41 GB | 5.1 hours | 30.61 miles | 1.17 marathons |
| The Witcher III | 49.5 GB | 4.2 hours | 25.51 miles | 0.97 marathons |
Spokesperson at Optimum, adds: “With the average download speed for Americans at 91.96mb/s – the 11th fastest in the world behind Singapore, Switzerland and France – this means that millions of gamers have wasted hours watching the uploads bar. Our research shows the benefits of having a high-speed internet connection and how this will save precious gameplay time. Players can spend more time perfecting their skills rather than waiting for the latest updates to install on their machines.”
For more information on the download speeds study, please visit Optimum.
tl;dr
- Optimum show the real-life equivalent of average game download speeds at 1mb/s, 50mb/s, 100mb/s and 1gb/s
- COD: Modern Warfare updates take an average of 46.5 HOURS to download, depending on your internet speed
- COD: Black Ops III has the most game updates since it’s release in 2015 (33)
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