Gaming Industry: The impact of COVID-19 Pandemic

Our lives have been changed in the past few weeks, most of us are quarantining due to COVID-19 pandemic. This lockdown is impacting billions of lives and industries. As we are spending our days at home, thus the consumption of internet and games has increased a lot.

People across the globe are looking for a way to distract and entertain themselves, a favourable time for mobile apps and games. Spending on digital video games hit a record high US$10bil in March as per SuperData report on April 23.

Spending climbed 15 per cent on mobile games, reaching US$5.7bil in March, SuperData reported. The mobile gaming industry has witnessed a huge surge, though it is for a short period of time. But there always two sides of a coin, on one side we have seen huge growth on the other side, many events and products either cancelled or delayed.

Cancelled Industry events

Entertainment Software Association cancelled this year’s E3 event which has been the go-to annual occurrence for the video game industry since the ’90s.

All competitive live events for Electronic Arts’ games are suspended including EA runs.

Activision Blizzard Esports decide to cancel all Overwatch League events in both March and April.

EVE Online’s Fanfest annual event has been cancelled due to COVID-19.

Activision Blizzard decided to cancel Call of Duty League events, moving all matches to an online-only format for the remainder of 2020.

GDC (Game Developers Conference) is postponed to avoid the virus’ spread.

The Taipei Game Show was postponed until June 25–28, 2020.

The Mobile World Congress was cancelled as several of the China-based vendors had to cancel plans.

PAX East was cancelled as vendors withdrew or scaled the plans back to present their products.

The 16th British Academy Games Awards are moved to a live-streamed event due to concerns over the coronavirus.

The physical 2020 Gamescom event was forced to cancel as Germany banned public events.

ESL Pro League Season 11 Global Offensive tournament, ESL announced that both the regular season and the finals will be split into two regions: Europe and North America and that regular season and the finals will be played entirely online.

The ongoing series of the 2020 Pokémon World Championships was cancelled by The Pokémon Company.

The League of Legends Championship Series and the League of Legends European Championship were suspended on March 13 and resumed play as an online-based format on March 20.

The live Rocket League World Championship for its 9th season, planned for April 24, 2020, in Dallas was indefinitely postponed.

The Overwatch League cancelled those occurring in China and moved them to later in the season to South Korea.

Production delay

Nintendo Switch – The production is delayed for the Japanese market, leading to shortages of Switch consoles, accessories, and games.

Oculus Quest back-ordered – The Quest is out of stock on the company’s website, Best Buy, and Amazon.

Outer Worlds port for Switch delayed – Virtuous, the Singapore-based studio, is working on the port, but Private Division game is not going to be available soon.

TurboGrafx-16 Mini delayed – The plug-and-play console is delayed indefinitely because of the coronavirus.

Valve Index – Valve Index virtual reality headset production was reduced due to the impact of the coronavirus.

When events and productions of the game being cancelled, the mobile gaming world has seen a huge growth in downloads. GlobalWebIndex reveals that people all over the world have been spending considerably more time on their digital devices as a result of coronavirus lockdowns.

76 per cent of internet users are spending more time using their smartphones in recent weeks compared to their pre-lockdown behaviours.

If most of the users are spending on their smartphones, then what are they doing? Well, games are their top choice, the data from App Annie shows that weekly downloads of mobile games in March 2020 jumped by 30% compared to weekly averages for the final quarter of 2019. In total, over 13 billion games have been downloaded during the first three months of 2020. And 69 per cent of the users are playing games on their smartphone.

Conclusion

A majority of countries are under lockdown and a global recession looming. Though we have seen a huge growth in the online activities still it is too early to measure the impact of the pandemic on the gaming industry. But, looking at the steady rise in the consumption of online gaming will witness a good amount of investments.