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The rise of E-Sports has taken a lot of folks by surprise, in just a short amount of time the concept of watching someone play a video game - let alone watching someone play a video game for money - has gone from a pipe dream to the norm. Streaming platforms like Twitch and Mixer see millions of hours of engagement a day, and with the top five countries earning over 200 million dollars in E-Sports winnings; everyone wants to be the next rising star.

Here are the top 5 E-Sports earning countries with the number of players, courtesy of E-Sports Earnings.

But truly testing yourself against these other countries of players, or better yet, finding the best teammates to enjoy a co-op game with sometimes proves challenging. In order to provide the best performance and latency for gaming, a lot of games will limit which servers you can join by your IP address - a universal identifier of where your computer or console is. That means if you are in the US and your friend is in the UK, you may not be able to play together. That’s where VPNs come into play.

Today those VPNs come as a service. Something like VyprVPN allows you to obtain an IP address from 700+ servers in over 60 countries and continents including North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. This means you can game with friends on any server worldwide without geographic restrictions.

There are many games that can only be played or downloaded in certain regions. If you’re in America, there are several popular Japanese and Korean games that are only available in their respective play stores. To download a game like this you’d need a VPN.  Depending on your goal, a VPN could lower your ping while playing online games such as DOTA 2, League of Legends, or SMITE. To do this, you’d choose a VPN server that’s closest to one of the game servers you are playing on, reducing the number of “hops” for the data to transfer through. Of course a VPN can also have the opposite effect. Sometimes though, this comes with a cost - namely higher lag just so you can play with friends.

Thankfully there are a lot of choices out there for your VPN service with a wide range of prices. There’s a great list of these compiled on the VPNs that provide the best service for gamers. This site will help you choose the best VPN for you and your gaming needs, looking at features like DDOS protection, latency, server availability and of course...price.