While most people are wondering how they are going to stay sound in this season of an extended period of social isolation, many video game players have taken it as a blessing. They have taken to their favorite platforms like the online casino games at betway88 to spend this federally instituted social isolation.
The Surge
Steam, an online digital games marketplace, hit an all-time peak number of users online during the March 14th weekend. On March 15th in the afternoon, their platform had 20.3 million concurrent users. This was their new record more than their previous high, which stood at 19 million.
However, of the 20.3 million users, only just over six million were actually in-game on Steam. The rest probably had their application open and were shopping, using the chat application, or the app was just running in the background.
Apart from Steam, there is a high likelihood that other online game providers like Betway88 also experienced an all-time high as people find ways to take care of the time they have on their hands. The surge will continue as long as more countries are moving into government advised social isolation. During the surge, the most popular games on Steam included Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is a military-themed multiplayer shooter. On March 14th it became the third game to reach one million concurrent players.
The other two games that attracted up to a million concurrent users are the Valve’s DOTA 2, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege, and the apparently immortal Grand Theft Auto V.
Since there was no big release by Steam during the weekend, the record-high number of players can be attributed to the social distancing, work-from-home, and closure of schools directives being implemented worldwide.
Network Activity
Mobile phone service providers also recorded an increase in their network activities from online games in the past week. Many gamers were accessing online games via their mobile phone networks. Most games have been optimized for mobile phone use making many users to prefer the convenience of playing from their mobile phones.
As the COVID-19 spreads, more Governments are likely to enforce the social isolation directive and push more people towards online games. The ripple effect is as more people play online, internet service providers will also experience a surge in the use of their services.
While we can attribute the surge can be attributed to the fact that people had to stay at home hence had time to catch up on their steam backlogs, some of the popularity can be credited to the well-publicized Xbox Live outage on March 15th. Even though Live was down only for a couple of hours, it was the second time it was down that week and was down long enough to make the list of the trending topics on Twitter.
Bottom Line
