If you're worried about data usage while playing Super Mario Run, your fears are not unwarranted. It turns out, everyone's favorite plumber does use a hefty amount of data compared to other popular online games. But, you can relax a little because some of the overabundance of data usage will die down as new downloads level off over the next few days or so.
- You haven't started playing Super Mario Run yet? Read our beginner's guide
- You've been playing Super Mario Run for hours and now want to know how to get better? Read our tips and tricks
It's not me, it's you
AppleInsider spent some time testing the data usage while playing Super Mario Run and are able to confirm that it is, indeed, high.
Several hours of testing the night of release by AppleInsider shows that, [discounting the effect of level downloads], a solid hour of constant play still pushed about 60 megabytes of data per hour. Social media reports vary somewhat, but most fall in the range of 40 to 60 megabytes per hour, with some higher and lower outliers that we are attempting to contact.
In comparison, Pokémon GO, which also received some backlash for its data usage, uses about 30 megabytes per hour of dedicated usage.
It gets better
It's not all doom and gloom for those of us that have data caps, though. AppleInsider also spoke with an Apple App store engineer, who explained why data usage will drop after the initial downloading frenzy has calmed down.
"The game is chatty," we were told. "Nintendo's doing a lot of fat-packet data shuffling back-and-forth to its own back-end, and if a packet fails, it'll keep trying for a bit until it gives up and errors out. This is all data use."
When you start playing Super Mario Run for the first time, you have to download level data packs. Similar to Pokémon GO's first few weeks in public, Nintendo is suffering from strained servers, which has been causing downloads to fail on some devices, which in turn makes you have to re-download the data.
The common belief is that, once the rush of downloads is over, Nintendo's servers will be back on track and issues with failed downloads will end. Thus, causing less data usage across the board for gamers.
So what can I do about it?
In the meantime, if you're on a data plan with a cap and you're worried about maxing it out, try playing on Wi-Fi instead. Don't play while on the subway or standing in line at the mall for a few more days (maybe even a week). Things should work themselves out and your data usage should go down, at least to Pokémon GO levels.
