Video Games Meteoric Rise with COVID-19
The Pandemic of 2020, the forced isolation of millions and millions of people, this is paradise for gamers. With the appearance of COVID-19, millions upon millions of people have been turning to video games to help deal with the mentally crippling of isolation. To understand this increase, first we should look at the largest gaming platform in the world, Steam.
Steam has always seen an incredible amount of playing using their platform every year, but as shown above, 2020 brought an incredible boost to their concurrent player count. From 2018 to 2019, Steams concurrent player count only increased by a mere 100,000 players. While that may seem like a lot of new people joining the gaming community, it’s nothing compared to the rise in 2020 or at the end of the year. From 2019 to 2020, Steam so an incredible rise in concurrent players from 18.6 million to a whopping 21 million players. And to top this all off, from that point in the summer of 2020, to the last concurrent player count as of December 7th, Steams concurrent player count has risen by 3 million more players. From the summer of 2020 to the winter, Steam saw the same player increase as the change from 2019 to 2020. Diving deeper into games in general, certain new player friendly games like Minecraft and Among Us have hauled in huge player bases with the start of this pandemic.
Since the pandemic started, Among Us has quickly skyrocketed to heights unimagined for the game in years past. When it was released in 2018, Among Us had a fan base that barely hit 50 players at its peak. So what changed? When isolation began and people were suddenly left without a way to spend time with their friends and fool around, and this game offered just that. With private lobbies and trickery and deceit around every corner, Among Us became the go to game for many friends across the country. This is highlighted by the meteoric rise in peak players in August of 2020 that leads to its record breaking player count of 438,524 players in September of 2020.
Next we take a look at a game that was incredibly popular among gamers way before COVID-19 was even known about. Minecraft was released in 2009, and has maintained a staggering amount of players since then. The chart above only covers 2016–2020, but even with these numbers you can see the meteoric rise in players. From 2016–2017, 2017–2018, and 2018-the end of 2018, each increase is only by about 15–20 million. from the end of 2018–2020, the game say an incredible increase from 91 million players to 128 million players. This rise is attributed to the pandemic and all the new players who pick up this new player friendly game. Many years ago this was also my first video game, and with many people stuck insides this home and this game being accessible on most every device, it seems many people are starting this way as well. This sheer rise of new players and players in general is not just attributed to the games themselves, Twitch.tv plays a large role in advertising and appealing players to these games and games of all types.
Finally, we break down Twitch.tv’s viewership over the past years. Even in 2015, only two years after it’s release, twitch has held a concurrent viewer base of at least 500k viewers. The viewing service saw a pretty moderate and stable increase over the years through 2019. With the coming of 2020, twitch, just like every other online service, saw an incredible increase in viewership from below 1.5 million to well past 2 million concurrent viewers. This extreme increase is also the reason why games like Minecraft and Among Us and platforms like steam have seen a dramatic increase. Many people watch twitch long before they start playing video games, and with the pandemic, more people are watching. This giant amount of new viewers also tends to serve as the new players for the games they watch.
This pandemic has isolated many people during this time, but it has only served as a catalyst to explosively expand the gaming industry, as well as introducing new gamers to the scene as well. From Steam’s dramatic increase in just the second half of the year, to Twitch’s explosive viewership count, gaming is on the rise.