Video Games Are Being Played At Record Levels

mood · Mar 25, 2020

Video Games Are Being Played At Record Levels As The Coronavirus Keeps People Indoors
March 16, 2020
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...vels-as-the-coronavirus-keeps-people-indoors/

Topline: With school closures, mandatory work-from-home policies and lockdowns taking place in the U.S. as a result of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, gaming has seen higher engagement, especially over this past weekend.
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Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record 20,313,451 concurrent users to the 16-year-old service, according to third-party database SteamDB.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, [...] breaking it's all-time peak on Sunday with 1,023,2290 concurrent players, topping its previous peak last month by a million [...]

Like other esports, CS:GO has had to cancel events due to the virus [...] though its peak viewership reached over a million, making it one of the most watched tournaments in the esports' history.

Activision Blizzard's new free-to-play battle royale spinoff Call of Duty: Warzone, launched March 10 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is also likely benefiting, drawing in a staggering 15 million in three days [...]
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mood · Mar 25, 2020

Steam breaks its concurrent users record as 20 million people stay indoors
March 16, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84402-steam-breaks-concurrent-user-record-20-million-people.html

What just happened? As the coronavirus forces millions around the world to stay at home and practice social isolation, it seems one way to pass the time is by playing some Steam titles. Over the weekend, Valve’s platform recorded its higher-ever number of concurrent players, over 20 million.

On Sunday, March 15, Steam reached a massive 20,313,476 concurrent users, beating the previous record of just under 20 million from 24 hours earlier. Before the weekend, Steam’s highest concurrent player count was 18.8 million set on February 2, which came a few hours before the Super Bowl.
While there were more than 20 million people logged into Steam, the in-game player count never went higher than 6.2 million—a million fewer than the 7.2 million record set on January 1, 2018.

There were also some high user numbers for Steam’s top games. Counter-Strike: GO saw over one million concurrent players, a new record, while DOTA 2 had over 700,000, and PUBG was over 500,000.
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Steam breaks its concurrent user record, again, passing 22 million people (March 23, 2020)

What just happened? With so many people around the world self-isolating to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Steam keeps seeing record numbers of concurrent users. After passing the 20 million figure last week, the service has now reached a new peak of over 22 million.

On March 15, Steam broke the previous concurrent user record when it passed 20 million. It had already beaten the 18.8 million record set on February 2 just 24 hours earlier. That figure passed 21 million on Friday, and Yesterday (March 22) saw a massive 22,678,529 people on Steam at the same time.
As for what’s being played, Counter-Strike: Go, which reached a peak player count of over 1.1 million this month, remains number one. It’s followed by Dota 2, PUBG, GTA V, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
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mood · Mar 30, 2020

Steam sets new concurrent user record for the third time in as many weeks
March 29, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84596-steam-sets-new-concurrent-user-record-third-time.html

Valve’s Steam platform for the third time in as many weekends has set a new concurrent user record as social distancing measures due to Covid-19 force additional people to stay indoors and find alternative ways to entertain themselves.
As of this writing, Steam has 23,392,298 users on its platform. Before the Coronavirus-induced rally, the most users that Steam ever had logged in at once was 18.8 million on February 2, just before the Super Bowl.

If I had to guess, Steam will continue to set new concurrent user records in the coming weeks.
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mood · Apr 1, 2020

Console and game sales surge across Europe following Covid-19 lockdown
April 1, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84644-console-game-sales-surge-across-europe-following-covid.html

In a nutshell: While the Covid-19 outbreak is having a devastating effect on many industries, it’s resulted in an uplift for some sectors. In addition to people spending much more on food and items such as toilet rolls, console and game sales have jumped across Europe.

Gamesindustry.biz analyzed the latest market data from GSD, which tracks hardware and software sales across multiple markets, and the results showed a huge uptick in spending on gaming.
[...] between the week of March 16-22, console sales rose by 155 percent to 259,169. The surge is described as being across the board, with significant gains for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
As shown by the record number of concurrent Steam users, more people are gaming than ever before, a fact reflected by the jump in console sales.

Video game sales have also increased as a result of self-isolation rules. Digital downloads were up 52.9 percent to 2.74 million across 50 markets— [...] Physical sales also jumped, by 82 percent week-on-week to 1.58 million.
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mood · Apr 7, 2020

Video game usage in US up 45% as spending jumps 39%
April 7, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84723-report-video-game-usage-us-up-45-spending.html

As part of its monthly Video Game Tracking survey (Via The Hollywood Reporter), Nielson Games surveyed around 3,000 people in the US, UK, France and Germany. According to the results, every country saw an increase in gaming time over the week between March 23 – 29. America’s 45 percent jump was the biggest spike in gaming time, followed by France’s 38 percent, the UK with 29 percent, then Germany with 20 percent.

With many areas implementing stay-at-home rules and so many retail stores closed, the number of Americans buying games digitally has gone up 42 percent.
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The findings echo an earlier GSD report that showed game and console sales were surging across Europe. The lockdown has also seen Steam breaking its concurrent user record, a jump in sales for home office products, and an uptick in streaming service signups.
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hawki · Apr 7, 2020

"Deathly pale and pot-bellied with a 'PlayStation thumb': Grotesque model reveals what avid gamers could look like in 20 years' time thanks to hours hunched over their consoles...

This cautionary vision was cooked up by researchers based on globally-sourced reports on the physical impacts of the gamer lifestyle..."

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/04/06/15/26867538-8192067-image-a-41_1586182027112.jpg

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/04/06/15/26867544-8192067-image-a-42_1586182033162.jpg

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...-like-20-years-time-thanks-hours-playing.html

mood · Apr 11, 2020

Call of Duty: Warzone has hit 50 million downloads in a month
April 10, 2020
https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/10/call-of-duty-warzone-has-hit-50-million-downloads-in-a-month/

Working from home has never been better thanks to Call of Duty: Warzone. Activision has announced that the battle royale version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has now hit 50 million downloads in the month since its debut on March 10.
That’s an astonishing achievement for a free-to-play game, which is about the same as what Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment hit with the debut of Apex Legends earlier last year.

Activision Blizzard and developer Infinity Ward announced the milestone in a tweet. The battle royale mode came out just as the coronavirus was forcing people to stay inside, and it seems that social distancing has contributed to its success.
The game hit 6 million players in its first 24 hours on the PC and consoles.
In four days, the total was 15 million.
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mood · May 16, 2020

Video game spending reaches record high during pandemic
Americans turn to video games during pandemic
May 16, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/85255-us-consumers-set-new-record-video-game-spending.html

Bottom line: The NPD Group said gains were noted across virtually all categories including digital PC and console games as well as mobile downloads, subscription spending, hardware and accessories.

US consumer spending on video games reached an all-time high in the first quarter as gamers looked to quell boredom while ordered to stay at home to slow the spread of Covid-19.
For the three-month period ending March 31, the US video game industry generated $10.86 billion in total revenue. That’s an increase of nine percent compared to the same period a year ago according to The NPD Group’s Q1 2020 Games Market Dynamics report.

Video game content (software) accounted for $9.58 billion of the total, an 11 percent increase year-over-year.
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mood · Jul 17, 2020

June video game spending was the highest it has been in a decade
Well, what do they expect us to do with our free time?
July 17, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/86041-video-game-spending-june-highest-has-decade.html

Why it matters: Thanks to the ongoing lockdowns, 2020 has been a big year for gaming. More people are staying at home with nothing better to do than play videogames. Meanwhile, game producers are reaping the rewards of the trend.

On Friday, NPD Group released a report showing that spending on video games through June is the highest in 10 years. So far this year, US consumers have spent $6.6 billion on video games and related equipment. The last time it was this high was 2010, when game spending reached $7 billion during the same period.
Sales on hardware, software, and accessories through the first half of 2020 are up 19 percent year over year. In June alone, game makers marked a 26-percent increase over 2019's sales numbers coming in at $1.3 billion. Last month was the highest tracked spend for June since 2009.
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With the next-generation of consoles coming out in the second half, we will likely see further increases in the market through the third and fourth quarters.
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mood · Jul 29, 2020

Roblox added 35 million monthly active users in just five months
July 29, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/86162-roblox-surges-past-150-million-monthly-active-users.html

Bottom line: Online platforms that curb boredom or fill a need, like gaming services or video conferencing apps, are likely only going to experience further growth as the Covid-19 pandemic stretches on with no end in sight.

Online gaming platform Roblox now enjoys more than 150 million monthly active users, the company revealed during its recent developer conference. The event, like most others in this uncertain time, was hosted digitally online.
Roblox is one of several companies that have benefited from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Back in February, Roblox was celebrating that it had reached 115 million monthly active users
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mood · Aug 10, 2020

People are still spending record amounts on gaming in the US this year
Games, consoles and accessories are all selling better than ever
August 10, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/record-video-game-spending-us-q2-2020-163834813.html

If it wasn’t already obvious that the coronavirus has been a boon for the video game market, industry analysts at the NPD Group have more evidence.

The reliable market-tracking firm says that people spent more on video games in the US in the second quarter than ever before. Total spending of $11.6 billion marked a 30 percent year-over-year increase and a seven percent bump over the prior quarter, when spending hit a then-record of $10.9 billion.
Not surprisingly, games made up the lions share of that number, with “video game content” accounting for $10.2 billion, up 28 percent from a year ago.

Hardware sales were “only” $848 million, but that mark represented a massive 57 percent bump from Q2 2019.
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mood · Aug 15, 2020

Gaming Now Counts Over 3 Billion Players Globally, Says DFC Intelligence
August 15, 2020
https://wccftech.com/gaming-now-counts-over-3-billion-players-globally-says-dfc-intelligence/

The latest Global Video Gamer Segmentation report has been released this Friday by games industry market research firm DFC Intelligence and as of mid-year, the global gaming population has now surpassed three billion players.

As expected, the mobile gaming market is by far the fastest-growing one, with nearly half of the aforementioned three billion players using only smartphones to play. The report also includes a breakdown by region, showing how large the mobile-only gaming market is in Asia.
Even so, China is also the biggest country when it comes to PC gaming with 300 million users, followed by India's almost 150 million.
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mood · Nov 16, 2020

Video games 'good for well-being', says University of Oxford study
November 16, 2020
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54954622

The Oxford Internet Institute research focused on two games: Nintendo's Animal Crossing and EA's Plants vs Zombies.

In an unusual step, the developers of the games shared anonymised data about how long each participant had played.
These logs were then linked to a survey in which the players answered questions about their well-being.
Surprising findings
Nintendo solely provided data on playing times in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

But EA also shared some data about in-game performance within Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville. This included achievements, and the emoticons the participants had used to express themselves.
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"If you play Animal Crossing for four hours a day, every single day, you're likely to say you feel significantly happier than someone who doesn't," he said.

"That doesn't mean Animal Crossing by itself makes you happy."
But, he added, 40 years of previous research had suggested the longer people played, the more unhappy they said they were.
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The professor has called on other games-makers to share similar data.
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Groundbreaking new study says time spent playing video games can be good for your wellbeing

With the UK in a second national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic and Christmas on the horizon, many will stay indoors to play and socially connect through video games. New research from Oxford University has delivered a surprising finding; time spent playing games is positively associated with wellbeing.

The new study is the first of its kind. Rather than asking players how much they play, it uses industry data on actual play time for popular video games Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
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mood · Dec 1, 2020

Americans of all ages are spending more on video games
November 30, 2020
https://venturebeat.com/2020/11/30/americans-of-all-ages-are-spending-more-on-video-games/

We know that time and money spent on video games is surging due to the pandemic. Now, industry-tracking firm The NPD Group is providing detail on where that growth is coming from. And it turns out that people across all age demographics are playing more games more often. That’s big for mobile games, but it also includes Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox.

In its “2020 Evolution of Entertainment” report, NPD found that 4-out-of-5 consumers in the U.S. played a game in the last six months. More important for the industry, those consumers are spending 26% more time and 33% more money on games than the same period in the previous year.
But this isn’t just coming from young people. Older demographics are turning to games more often as they find themselves with money they can no longer spend on dining out or attending live events.
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From The NPD Group's 2020 Evolution of Entertainment report. Check out the increases in time spent gaming across different age ranges driven by pandemic-driven behavior changes. And pubs and devs, please note the 35+ jumps. pic.twitter.com/7oWBUJDS1b
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) November 30, 2020
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mood · Oct 19, 2021

Sea of Thieves sails past 25 million players
October 19, 2021
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-10-19-sea-of-thieves-sails-past-25-million-players

Rare's multiplayer Xbox and PC pirate adventure launched in March 2018, and has grown steadily since.

Executive producer Joe Neate said the introduction of seasons earlier this year, as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean crossover, sparked "a huge influx of players casting off for the first time".
To celebrate, anyone who plays Sea of Thieves between today, 19th October and 3pm UK time on 26th October gets a special login bonus of 25,000 gold and 25 Doubloons.
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Sea of Thieves Celebrates Five Million Players

In all the excitement of yesterday's release of Cursed Sails, you may have missed that we reached the awesome milestone of having welcomed more than five million players to the Sea of Thieves since launch. Seeing this number is both inspiring and humbling.
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mood · Oct 31, 2021

Roblox has been down for two days and it’s not because of Chipotle
Roblox is having some major server issues
October 30, 2021
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/30/22754107/roblox-down-outage-chipotle-server-issues-status

Roblox has been down for more than two days, with the game and its related website offline for millions of players. The hugely popular game-creating platform first started having issues at around 7PM ET on October 28th. Roblox initially said it was “working hard to get things back to normal,” and that it had identified “the root cause as [an] internal system issue.”

In a statement to The Verge, Roblox confirms its platform isn’t down due to an “external intrusion,” and that the company is working “around the clock” to resolve the huge outage. “We believe we have identified an underlying internal cause of the outage with no evidence of an external intrusion,” says a Roblox spokesperson.
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Initially, some Robox players speculated the outage could be related to a Chipotle promotion in the game. Chipotle is giving away $1 million worth of free burritos on Roblox as part of Halloween event in the game.
Roblox was quick to reveal its issues aren’t related to the Chipotle promotion, though.

“We know that this outage was not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on the platform,” says the official Roblox Twitter account.
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It’s a surprisingly long outage for Roblox, with players still waiting to hear exactly when the game will return. The main Roblox site is offline in a maintenance mode, and the status page was only updated after more than 24 hours earlier today
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Roblox is very popular, especially with kids — more than 50 percent of Roblox players are under the age of 13. More than 40 million people play it daily, and its popularity surged through 2020 during the pandemic.
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mood · Nov 2, 2021

Minecraft and Among Us see growth in usage thanks to Roblox outage
November 2, 2021
https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/...s-see-growth-in-usage-thanks-to-roblox-outage

Roblox has been unavailable for players for three days, which led to the decline of the average time spent in the app by 93% from October 29 to 31. A few rival apps and games, however, saw a rise in their usage rate thanks to this outage.

According to Sensor Tower, Minecraft’s usage increased by 2% week-over-week after Roblox’s outage, while Among Us saw a 6% rise over the same period.

Time spent in Among Us rose by 12% on October 29, with its mobile downloads peaking at 436K on October 30 (+19% from the previous week). As the analysts pointed out, it was the best day for the game in terms of downloads since April 4.

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Roblox went down on October 28, affecting millions of players across the globe. The game went back online on October 31. While the company said that it identified the root cause, it didn’t specify the specific reasons for the outage.
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mood · Nov 8, 2021

Almost one million people are playing Forza Horizon 5 ahead of its full release
November 8, 2021
https://www.techspot.com/news/92119-almost-one-million-people-playing-forza-horizon-5.html

Highly anticipated: Forza Horizon 5 finally arrives tomorrow, but those who purchased the Premium Edition or the Premium Add-Ons Bundle have been playing the game since November 5. It’s easy to imagine that, seeing as it’s coming to Xbox Game Pass/Game Pass for PC, not many people chose to spend up to $99 on the driving game, but that’s far from the case: almost one million players are already tearing up Mexico.

As reported by VGC, Forza Horizon 5’s Hall of Fame leaderboard that compares the achievements of every player in the game is already showing 800,000 users across Xbox and PC.
Using those figures, VGC estimates that Forza 5 has already grossed between $36 million and $79 million before its full launch.
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mood · Nov 10, 2021

mood said: ↑

Almost one million people are playing Forza Horizon 5 ahead of its full release November 8, 2021
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Forza Horizon 5 has already crossed 4.5 million players since launch
November 10, 2021
https://www.onmsft.com/news/forza-horizon-5-has-already-crossed-4-5m-players-since-launch

Forza Horizon 5 was released just yesterday, November 9, but it’s already off to a record start. Xbox head Phil Spencer announced on Twitter that the open-world racing game already crossed 4.5M players across Xbox, PC, and Xbox Cloud gaming, making it the largest launch day for a first-party game.

It really helps that Forza Horizon 5 launched day one on Xbox Game Pass, but so did Forza Horizon 4 three years ago. According to Spencer, the peak concurrent players number in Forza Horizon 5 is currently 3x higher than the one from Forza Horizon 4, which is definitely impressive.

We've invested for years in Xbox so more people can play. With 4.5+ million players so far across PC, cloud & console, Forza Horizon 5 shows that promise coming to life. Largest launch day for XGS game, peak concurrent 3x FH4 high. Thank you players & congrats to @WeArePlayground
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) November 10, 2021
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mood · Jul 27, 2022

mood said: ↑

Video games 'good for well-being', says University of Oxford study
November 16, 2020

Groundbreaking new study says time spent playing video games can be good for your wellbeing
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Gaming time has no link with levels of wellbeing, study finds
A study of 39,000 video gamers has found "little to no evidence" time spent playing affects their wellbeing
July 27, 2022

The average player would have to play for 10 hours more than usual per day to notice any difference, it found. And the reasons for playing were far more likely to have an impact.
Well-being was measured by asking about life satisfaction and levels of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and frustration.

The results contradict a 2020 study.
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Conducted by the same department at the Oxford Internet Institute - but with a much smaller group of players - the 2020 study had suggested that those who played for longer were happier.

"Common sense says if you have more free time to play video games, you're probably a happier person," said Prof Andrew Przybylski, who worked on both studies.
"But contrary to what we might think about games being good or bad for us, we found [in this latest study] pretty conclusive evidence that how much you play doesn't really have any bearing whatsoever on changes in well-being.
This time, technology companies, including Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, provided six weeks' data [...]
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Gaming does not appear harmful to mental health, unless the gamer can't stop - Oxford study

Societies may tremble when a hot new video game is released, but the hours spent playing popular video games do not appear to be damaging players’ mental health, according to the largest-ever survey of nearly 40,000 gamers and their gaming habits, which was conducted over six weeks by a team from Oxford’s Internet Institute. That does not mean, however, that the research did not throw up some concerns – and, the team argues, much more information is needed before tech regulators, can really rest easy.
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Video Games Are Being Played At Record Levels

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