Big problem with online gaming in South Africa

South African gamers playing fast-paced competitive titles online often have more than just their opponents to face off against — they must also contend with high latencies.

Latency, or “ping,” refers to the delay in the transfer of data from when an instruction is sent to when it is processed and its result is reflected.

Although fibre optic undersea cables connecting the world offer fast data transfers with very low latencies, the nearest servers to South Africa for many popular games are often in the UK, Europe, Asia, or the US.

According to Wonder Network, the average latency between London and Johannesburg was around 168ms in early December 2024.

Although that delay won’t have any meaningful impact on most online applications, it can be a literal game-changer in competitive multiplayer titles where a split-second action can be the difference between virtual life or death.

MyBroadband compiled a list of 26 of the most popular online multiplayer titles and found that just nine of them had official servers located in South Africa.

Not counting sequels like those in the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises, only one major new multiplayer title got South African servers — first-person-shooter Valorant.

There are some simple explanations for why South Africa does not have a large selection of official servers for major games.

Firstly, rolling out and maintaining local game servers is expensive.

If they were to stand idle they would be a waste of money.

A game publisher requires that a particular country must have a certain number of players to justify the price of local servers.

Although South Africa’s gaming market is the biggest in Africa in terms of revenue and paying users, it is a far cry from the larger markets like the US, Europe, and China.

A Newzoo report found that South Africa had roughly 26.5 million gamers in 2023, making up just 0.7% of 3.79 billion players in the world.

The popularity of battle royale games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in the past few years may be exacerbating the problem.

These games require a larger number of players — at least 30 — to initiate a session.

Considering the smaller pool of players in the country, locals could have to wait much longer for a lobby to reach the required number of players for a game to begin than they would when playing on an EU or UK server.

Secondly, South Africa’s position at the bottom of the continent not only increases latency to many developed countries but comes with another problem.

While it probably has the best networks and data centres to house game servers on the continent, countries located further to the north may be better options for official servers.

Countries like Egypt and Nigeria are closer to major markets like southern Europe and the richer parts of the Middle East.

There may be instances where issues on servers in those regions could temporarily push players over to servers in the more northern African countries with less of a ping issue than if they had called back to a South African server.

Improvements could be coming

The good news is that global latencies could improve substantially over time as backhaul network providers start focusing more on this particular metric rather than just capacity.

One recent example of this is Paratus Group launching a new “express route” offering the lowest latency between Johannesburg and London through a 1,890km terrestrial link between Johannesburg and Swakopmund in Namibia.

From Swakopmund, the route links up with Google’s Equiano undersea cable before going northward under the sea to Europe.

This route bypasses having to cover the extra distance between Johannesburg and one of South Africa’s coastal towns before linking up with one of the major international undersea cables going around Africa.

In addition, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks with satellite-to-satellite links could also form more direct international communication routes through space.

Calculations by a respected professor of networked systems and computer science at University College London showed that SpaceX’s Starlink could support latencies as low as 99ms between Johannesburg and London with satellite-to-satellite links.

A combination of satellite links and ground-based relay stations could reduce this further to 77ms, around half the current best latency between the two locations.

The table below shows 30 of the most popular online multiplayer games in December 2024 and whether they have official or community servers in South Africa.