Up to 78% of gamers rage-quit over lag, according to a new study

Hardly a piece of hardware is sold these days without promises of dramatically reduced lag, yet it is still around and a major source of rage-quit, according to the server and hosting group Liquid Web.

It claims to have surveyed 1,000 gamers across multiple platforms, and to have found that 95% of them have encountered lag in their lives. A "staggering" 78% of the cohort have apparently reported exiting a game in anger as a result.

The majority (85%) of Xbox users surveyed were liable to rage-quit in this manner, although the same could apparently be said of a lot of PlayStation, PC and Nintendo gamers, at rates of 81%, 77% and 72% respectively.

Those who played games requiring high performance and/or fast reaction times exhibited the least patience with lag (somewhat unsurprisingly); the gamers in this study were willing to put up with an average of 45 milliseconds of lag at the most.

58% of those who played Call of Duty reported a rage-quit sparked by latency, while 43% of Fortnite players and 42% of Counter-Strike 2 fans doing the same.

The negative emotional sequelae of latency was also found to affect the respondents' lives even in the absence of succumbing to a rage-quit. 16% experienced anger that lasted 19 minutes on average post-game, while 8% of the gamers admitted to breaking a controller and 5% ended up in tears.

Latency is affected by a number of factors. 10% of the gamers in the new study blamed their consoles, while another 14% blamed the developers.

However, the most (72%) held their internet connections responsible: on that note, the participants were mostly located in US cities such as Austin, Los Angeles and New York.