I've always been an advocate of keeping your personal data as private as you can to stave off the creeping hand of digital tyranny, but for gaming? Nah, no chance. I'm a (wannabe) competitive gamer and I need my latency as low as possible, and VPNs are a no-go. At least, that's what I thought until I actually tried a bunch of them out for an extended period.
During my testing of the best VPNs for gaming, I was surprised to find that—at least with some of them, in my location—it wasn't a case of making the best of a bad situation. In fact, in some cases my ping actually dropped lower than without a VPN on.
This is good news not just because it means you don't have to keep toggling your VPN off and on, or keep adding an app to your 'split tunnel' in the VPN software each time you install a new game, but also because you get to keep all the benefits of a VPN while playing your games.
If you're cautious about sketchy enemies or teammates potentially trying to don their 1337 hacker gloves and doxx you, for instance, keeping your VPN on can give you some more peace of mind. And if your ISP throttles gaming...
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