The idea that VPNs should have a game mode, comes from the concept that a VPN routes traffic to a server and then access the internet from there.
Combined with that fact that game servers are located around the world.
So in theory a game mode for VPNs would just detect the game your playing find the fastest connection it has to that games server in your country (trying to reduce network lag) and ideally you will have an ultra fast secure network connection to play your game on.
Could this work or would game providers need to host a VPN service built into their game?
A VPN “game mode” is called split tunneling, and it “allows” data to take direct path to the destination and not traverse the tunnel. If your intent is to obfuscate your originating location, changing the far end VPN egress point will still be as slow as the encrypting and decrypting engines doing the math. You can try to find device or software that does selective split tunneling so only the signaling data is secured and the streaming rtp data takes the shortest unencrypted path.
The way both algorithms roughly work it’s that routers advertise which addresses they can reach. And neighbors record this information but adding a weight, that takes into account how many hops are needed as well as other factors for tiebreaking.
VPN networks, specially the large commercial ones, do use these algorithms as well to route you inside their infrastructure.
But there will always be more hops inside a VPN than outside. Plus the latency induced by encapsulation and de-encapsulation .
When I made similar reply that I haven’t heard about VPN can make gaming faster, some people replied that there really exist VPNs that tailored specifically for games like this OP said, which reduce latency by optimising hops to reach the server.
I haven’t used that, and am doubtful about it even if some providers do make such claims. There are many games, and even more game servers, in the world, how could VPN providers economically optimise, maybe manually if the current automatic route is not optimised, each and every locations to make a most effective route to a server? I also have doubt that if it is realistic, how much improvement can be made to the latency, that is enough to attract gamers’ money.
It’s just encrypting network data which on modern hardware or even better dedicated hardware* can be very fast. Having it built into the game and server could remove some of the overheads when people use VPN clients and servers.
*Some modern CPUs have encryption built in at the hardware level.
Or maybe the game has a built in VPN client to encrypt the networked data super fast (in theory a game could compress it’s regular used data to a few bytes e.g. most common 256 network messages stored in a single byte)