Is the Pandemic Good for the Game Industry?
The SARS-CoV-2 is a new type of Corona Virus that appeared late 2019 in Wuhan, China going by the name “COVID-19”. It spread very quickly in China, but at the time of this article was written, the disease has almost been eradicated in China. The new cases are now in the rest of the world. Due to the contagious nature of the disease, health officials have advised the public to take part in social distancing, which has led to most offices and schools sending their workers and students home. Large number of live sporting events with massive crowds like the NBA season have been cancelled to help mitigate the spread of the virus.
As a result of this, majority of the population is now at home. There has been a spike of what the stock market calls “stay at home stocks” like Netflix and other streaming services. What has not been mentioned in the news, however, is the boom in online play. On the weekend of Friday 13th March 2020, Steam obliterated its all-time record for concurrent users over the weekend with a 24-hour peak set at 20,313,451, according to data from the PC gaming platform’s website. It’s the first time Steam has ever had more than 20 million users online at once; nearly 6.4 million of them were actively playing a game, with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hit an all-time peak of 1,024,845 simultaneous players to become the most popular game over the weekend, while Dota 2 and PUBG followed with 701,632 and 515,050 players respectively. The Call of Duty franchise also released a new massive free-to-play combat arena from the world of Modern Warfare on March 10th. It saw 15 million players joining in less than a week.
The Sim Racing community has had a major increase in users, leading to widely televised sim races by real drivers. It all started when youtuber Veloce Esports, decided to hold a competition dubbed “Not The AusGP”, which had competitors play the F1 2019 game online. This was in response to the cancellation of the first stage of the 2020 Formula 1 season that was supposed to be held in Melbourne, Australia. Real F1 drivers like Lando Norris & Stoffel Vandoorne took part in the competition. Youtubers, SimRacers and in a crossover event nobody saw coming, Real Madrid and Belgian National Team goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois joined in on the fun. After that, NASCAR and iRacing announced the Pro Invitational Series, an exhibition esports series that will pit drivers from the Cup, Xfinity and Truck series, as well as a group of NASCAR dignitaries, in what was being billed as a “simulation-style showcase. The F1 team also started officially televising the sim races again starting with the “NotTheBahGP” with celebrities like Liam Payne joining in on the fun. The MotoGP scene was also not left behind as they decided to hold their own “StayAtHomeGP”. Other motorsport series that went virtual include IndyCar.
The Stay at Home directive is benefiting the online gaming community pushing for more creative events that gamers and the public alike can all partake in from the comfort of their own homes. The CDC do not know how long the virus pandemic will last but while the public hopes for the best, there may be more interesting concepts that will change the online gaming industry. Game developers may, out of necessity come up with ways to gamify concepts like education to make it easier for parents to ensure their children’s education. Beyond that, we might even see the development studios add in DLCs to existing games to allow a higher maximum number of players for LAN play just to make sure we all enjoy this lock down.
LudiqueWorks is a video game publishing and video game development company based out of Africa. With a network of 150+ studios in 30 countries across Africa.
LudiqueWorks invests in nascent video game development studios on the continent through training and funding, as well as building a growing video gaming community through the Africa Game Developers network.
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