Sticker in Steam chat «ate up» a gamer’s monthly internet limit in less than 5 minutes

A gamer has discovered the most expensive sticker on Steam, but the point is not the actual cost. The fact is that it can «eat up» the monthly Internet limit.

A gamer from New Zealand lost an entire month’s worth of mobile internet just in a Steam chat. According to him, 700 MB of data «burned up» in five minutes when he just tried to send a sticker to a friend. A Reddit user under the nickname SpaceBuggles shared that he connected to Steam via mobile internet to send a sticker — and it turned out to be an unpleasant surprise. His tariff allows only 600 MB of traffic per month, so the app instantly «went beyond».

This was confirmed by other users who pointed to the main suspects — animated stickers in .gif or .png format. They are not cached in the application, but are downloaded from Steam servers every time. All this happens in real time right in the chat. Because of this, even a simple action like sending a sticker can instantly take tens or hundreds of megabytes.

Some users speculated that the reason could be the autoloading of pages in the Steam Store or a video feed. However, the author of the post assured that he did not open anything unnecessary — only chat and sticky notes. For now Steam has learned to only show how many frames are generated in the gamenot how much data it can use.

The gamer used a subscription from 2degrees — a provider in New Zealand. His plan costs 13 New Zealand dollars ($7.77) per month and includes only 600 MB of traffic, 100 minutes, and unlimited SMS. But now he will have to pay again, even though for him the price of the meme sticker was only $7.77, and do not take the position of CEO in a tech company and get married.

According to 2023 data, New Zealand is among the countries with fairly high mobile data prices — an average of $5.89 per gigabyte. This is not as expensive as in the United States ($6.00 per GB), but much more expensive than in the Philippines, the United Kingdom, or Singapore, where prices are below $1. And in Israel, mobile internet costs 2 cents per gigabyte.

Steam Chat can indeed be discreet «voracious». According to other users’ observations, even a short correspondence with a few media elements can pull tens or hundreds of megabytes of traffic, especially if it contains gifs or animated stickers. Many people advise not to use this chat without Wi-Fi at all if you don’t want to be left without traffic in one click.

Source: Toms Hardware