Gaming to a big part of a lot of lives. It’s a way to relax, a way to make income, and a way to just have some fun. There are so many ways to enjoy video games in the present day, from consoles by Nintendo, PlayStation, and Microsoft to gaming PCs and mobile devices to simply watching others stream on a platform like Twitch or YouTube. If you are an avid gamer on any of these platforms, you know that download speeds and reliable wifi is a must. This is why the list of 2021’s best cities for gamers was formulated.
With this year’s video game hardware sales up 81% compared to the previous year, the personal-finance website WalletHub released its report on 2021’s Best Cities for Gamers. To determine the best places to be a serious gamer, WalletHub compared the 100 largest cities across 22 key indicators of gamer-friendliness. The data ranges from average internet speed to video-game stores per capita.
| Top 20 Cities for Gamers | |
| 1. Irvine, CA | 11. Los Angeles, CA |
| 2. Austin, TX | 12. Raleigh, NC |
| 3. San Francisco, CA | 13. Oakland, CA |
| 4. Seattle, WA | 14. Plano, TX |
| 5. Orlando, FL | 15. Madison, WI |
| 6. Anaheim, CA | 16. Durham, NC |
| 7. Fremont, CA | 17. Denver, CO |
| 8. San Diego, CA | 18. Atlanta, GA |
| 9. Washington, DC | 19. Portland, OR |
| 10. San Jose, CA | 20. New York, NY |
So what do the results say? Well, Las Vegas has the most video-game stores per square root of the population, 0.031378, which is 26 times more than in Boston, the city with the fewest at 0.001209. If you live in California and game, think about moving to Irvine, California if your download speed is slow. Irvine, CA has the highest average download speed, 89 Mbps, which is 3.6 times higher than in Buffalo, New York.
Gilbert, Arizona, has the highest share of households with a broadband connection, 95.80 percent, which is 1.5 times higher than in Detroit, the city with the lowest at 64.40 percent. For our gamers here in North Carolina, Winston-Salem has the cheapest monthly internet cost, $41.88! This price is three times more affordable than in Anchorage, Alaska, where it costs an average of $123.85 for the internet.
