Across the world, internet speeds are improving, with fiber-optic cables bringing new levels of stability and bandwidth to homes everywhere. More and more places are able to get connections, and existing connections are constantly being elevated. In the USA, the national average download speed is 214 Mbps in 2025, with many urban areas achieving far higher speeds than that. That’s great news for gamers, but it’s not the only change that’s occurring.
Gaming platforms know that the internet is always getting better, and they are leveling up their “game” (pardon the pun) to capitalize on those improvements. Things are possible now that never would have been in the past, and there’s no question that game developers are making the most of it. Let’s find out how!
Live Streaming Options
It’s not long ago that live streaming would have been completely out of the question. You couldn’t possibly live-stream when the internet was chugging along at a few Kb/s and most people were on dial-up connections. The data needed would have been ridiculous even for those with high-power setups.
A few decades on, how things have changed. Now, live streaming is absolutely possible for a large number of gamers, and game developers have quickly taken advantage of that possibility.
One example is the appearance of live dealers in casinos. These have totally transformed the digital casino experience. Goodbye to flat, 2D, solo experiences. Hello to vivid, player-focused, humanized options that put a professional live dealer right in front of the player’s screens and let them access an in-person-like experience from the comfort of their couches.
These games take things to a totally new level. Say you’re playing blackjack. Playing against a live dealer like in this clip immerses you completely in the game, letting you enjoy the nuances brought by body language, and the pure human connection of playing with other people! There’s a special magic to knowing that you’re watching a dealer’s action in real time, streamed across the world.
Rubberbanding is Becoming Less Common
Remember the early days of multiplayer gaming, where sometimes your opponents would zip backward or jerk to one side in a very unnatural movement (often just dodging your attack in the process)? That wasn’t them cheating, but the result of a fairly clever piece of programming the developers used to hide server delays.
Instead of your game having to request an update from the server, and the server in turn waiting for updates about how each player had moved since the last frame, then sending that to you, your computer would do its best to predict where the players would be in the next frame and show you that happening.
The benefits were a game that seemed to play far more smoothly than the internet speeds of the time could possibly facilitate. The downside was that if one of your opponents made a particularly unexpected series of moves, or your internet connection faltered slightly, allowing the differences between the server and your computer’s version of the game to get further out of sync, you could end up seeing some very strange maneuvers once the connection picked up again and your computer tried to rapidly reconcile its version of events with the server’s.
Despite making many kinds of live play possible in the first place, rubberbanding was the bane of many players’ lives and an infuriating example of technology being stretched to its limits to achieve the expected level of gameplay, but not quite managing to succeed.
It was one of those things that worked so well when you didn’t notice it, but drew massive amounts of hatred whenever it failed to a noticeable degree… but think about it. When was the last time you saw any noticeable rubberbanding in a modern game? And if you did, was it a character glitching several meters from their expected position, or just a small tweak to their location? Rubberbanding used to be a major source of aggravation in the games that utilized it, but these days, while many games still use it (internet speeds still aren’t quite up to matching the frame rates of most modern games), it’s far less of an issue than in the past.
Multiplayer Games are More Detailed
This relates to the above but bears mentioning. Ever since the technique was first developed, game companies have known that noticeable rubberbanding was a problem for many players, so how could they hide it? Well, one technique was to simplify the gameplay. If characters weren’t forced to make as many fast moves or unpredictable decisions, then accurately predicting a character’s movements on the server side became much easier, and the players were less likely to notice the difference when their opponents snapped back to their true positions.
Likewise, limiting the number of entities in the gameworld also helped reduce package size, at the cost of capping how complex many games could be. In some cases, these restrictions may actually have enhanced the gameplay. Creativity often flourishes when we are forced to work around limiting factors, after all, but as greater internet speeds have become the norm, game developers have found themselves free to create games that transmit more data in each package.
Somewhere along the way she found herself doing freelance consulting for small businesses and home users, supporting both Linux and Windows users and integrating Linux and Windows on the LAN, primarily Linux servers and Windows clients. She is the author of the Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and the Linux Cookbook 2nd Edition for O'Reilly, and has written hundreds of Linux howtos for various publications, .