The VPNs listed on this subreddit are for general use which can also be used for gaming. However, there are dedicated gaming VPNs as well. I’m not sure what the difference between the two are or if one is better than the other for gaming purposes only. I barely see this sub mention dedicated gaming VPNs which makes me wonder if they are any good.
In the vast majority of cases a VPN will increase ping and thus decrease gaming performance. In some rare cases where your ISP has atrocious routing, or blocks the connection to game servers, or the game has a regional block, only then can a VPN be of any help. In 99% of cases “gaming VPNs” are snake oil at best.
However, there are dedicated gaming VPNs as well. I’m not sure what the difference between the two are or if one is better than the other for gaming purposes only.
I apologize in advance if this sounds “sales-y”. It is a tough one for me to write this response as I clearly relate directly to the OP’s question, yet I clearly have a bias towards gaming while using a VPN. I encourage everybody to be critical of everything and I hold myself as no exception. So with that said, my response:
1- Technology stack. A better/faster technology stack means that the latency overhead is better. Wireguard for example has a dramatically less overhead than OpenVPN. Less overhead is generally better for gaming, especially FPS/competitive gaming. 20-30ms can be substantial especially at the upper echelons of competitive gaming.
2- Server quality. The VPN server itself. Most VPN providers pack as many users on a server as possible for business/profit reasons. This can cause very large jitter, latency/ping spikes, and cause issues when doing gaming that requires a low jitter and reliably low latency. In addition, the server must have low latency, low jitter, and high bandwidth.
As a VPN provider myself, I operate differently. I spread my users as THIN as possible across my servers, meaning I put users on empty servers first. I value their performance over my profit.
3- Desktop software. A normal/generic VPN usually has a software package that doesn’t do much other than connect you to a VPN.
I mentioned earlier that I am a VPN provider myself tailored to gaming. My customer desktop software has some features that gamers will find more friendly. For example, the ability to play a game OFF a VPN, while using a VPN for everything else. Easy drag/drop integration with your game. A simplified IP Routing engine that makes custom VPN/NO VPN decisions based on game server IPs.
I also have more game-related features coming soon, such as Private LAN. This will enable LAN games to be played amongst people anywhere in the world. Think old school games that are IPX, localhost hosted, LAN-only, or games that you don’t want to expose to the Internet.
I hope this helps explain things from my perspective!
There isn’t anything inherently special about it, it isn’t going to make a terrible internet connection and make it super fast. VPNs traditionally are used for remote access there are VPNs now for privacy use but tbh it’s not very private you are just taking your data and routing it through someone else’s datacenter. That doesn’t make it inherently better or secure because if the other end of the connection isn’t secure then you aren’t. Gaming VPN is just marketing mumbo jumbo and tbh it may actually hurt your connection than help it.
There is no such difference, at least being offered by any VPN Service that I know of.
A plain jane VPN with just one normal server between you and the destination should work fine with all games, but it will cause more latency/lag due too not having a direct connection between the 2 and vpn server location will further affect it most.
In theory at least, i honestly haven’t played a video game in 10+ years.
Can you say why exactly you want/need a VPN while gaming? If so, may be able for others to suggest better methods.
“Gaming” sells anything these days, gaming PC, gaming keyboard, gaming mouse, gaming monitor, gaming router and many other shit. Not all of them actually provides “gaming” benefits.
However I can think of two areas where VPN actually can provide some benefits.
- Better peering with cloud providers like AWS/GCP/Azure. Most modern games have session servers hosted on those public cloud providers and these cloud providers usually have PoPs all over the globe and the PoPs have good peering with regional ISPs. However if there is no peering, your traffic may be routed to another PoP or go through several other ASes before going to the regional PoP, slowing things down. Having a VPN stragetically placed to shorten the round trip may help sometimes.
- Geo block bypass, there is always a need for something like this. Having a lightweight VPN that does geo bypass while not losing too much performance compared to other full-feature VPN can be considered worthy of “gaming” prefix.
However as I said, usually the gaming prefix is there only to sell shit. VPN can slow you down more if not implemented properly.
- If you already have good connection to AWS/Azure, adding a VPN usually just slows you down.
- VPN always increase network topology complexity, usually inducing NAT problems if the VPN isn’t specifically designed to mitigate that.
My friends play from regions outside of NA and some games are virtually unplayable without a VPN. For them it’s definitely not snake oil because there are things they physically cannot do without a VPN rather than it being placebo.
I am trying to find a VPN to use because my routing to a specific game is terrible. I don’t experience connection issues to any other game except this one and I don’t think it’s exactly always a game issue because when I say I’m lagging in raid, I’m quite often the only one.
Very cool that you can make old school games on ipx playable over the internet. I think this is super cool and would love more info. Like the old school days of lan parties without the lugging around of your computer, lol.
I’m not exactly trying to use a VPN for better speeds. I have really bad routing to this 1 specific game and experience frequent lag spikes or packet loss. Don’t think it is an issue with the game because when I say I’m lagging in raid, it’s almost always just me.
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I’m guessing I have routing issues because when I do a traceroute without a VPN, there is a very high variance in the ping with a lot of spikes compared to when I try it with a VPN. I experience severe packet loss at times as well. I don’t think it is my internet because I don’t have this issue with other games. I don’t think it is a game issue because others don’t experience this problem regularly.
That’s exactly what I have in mind! But it actually is beyond that as well. In certain areas of the world, such as China, Taiwan, there exists a ginormous community of gamers who plan LAN-based games competitively. We’re talking millions of gamers.
Plus on top of that, even semi-retro games like the original Starcraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation, Duke Nukem, Doom, etc., are all LAN-based games. But they all have massive security implications with them as well.
Playing these sorts of games on a “Private LAN” allows you to only have trusted people connect and play with you, and even those people will only “see” your VPN IP, never your real IP.
These types of things is what I encompass in my own GamingVPN, which answers the OP question about “What makes a VPN a GamingVPN” (summarizing here).
Brilliant and would be a great solution for that niche (that sounds like it’s actually pretty big).
I thought about doing stuff like this because in the older days the MS tcpip protocol allowed encapsulating IPX, so there was technical capability that was dropped in future versions (or was it netbui encapsulation in IPX–I forget which now–but you get the idea).
Yup you’re correct, but encapsulating IPX means that things using IPX won’t work. So it definitely needs to be specialized!
Yep, a specialized solution that’s transparent to the end systems and all the encapsulation/encoding/encryption in transit. Even if it’s a small box on the client side, that would be great if it’s cheap–then it’s truly plug and play. 
Since gaming VPNs are also just VPNs, can one use them just for normal online stuff that is NOT gaming? I mean, I understand that Gaming VPNs may have something that normal VPNs don’t have because they don’t focus on solving certain problems. But, are there things that Gaming VPNs don’t have but are desirable for normal VPNs? Can I just use a gaming VPN, and modulo the gaming, it’s still just like my usual VPN, and I don’t have to get an additional VPN for normal usage?