Already 18 days that France entered containment, 18 days that had to be completed. Once the (tele) work day is over, leisure takes control. Books in paper or on the Internet, films and series to occupy the evenings carve out a place of choice. As an indoor entertainment par excellence, video games have never performed as well as during this period. For the past three weeks, online gaming platforms have been beating record after record and consoles have gone up like hotcakes.
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Consoles out of stock
Whether in terms of console sales or connections to their online services, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, the three giants of the video game, are not spreading in numbers. But the success is there. "We do not want to communicate too much out of respect for the sectors in difficulty but yes, we are making a splash! This is a very good period for us", explains to Europe 1 a console manufacturer who wants to remain discreet.
In fact, the consoles were taken by storm at the start of confinement, like the Switch, that of Nintendo, still out of stock Thursday at Fnac and Amazon. Some merciless sellers have also taken the opportunity to drive up prices, up to 400 or 500 euros in confinement, against 300 euros in normal times. In terms of games, there too, few figures available. The hugely popular shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) broke its record for the number of players logged in simultaneously (1.2 million on Thursday). And on console, family games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart vie for the head of sales, closely followed by the behemoths FIFA 20 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare .
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Records in France and around the world
If the console manufacturers are discreet, others do not hesitate to display their success, such as Steam, the platform that allows you to buy and play online games on a computer. It breaks new attendance records every day. Thus, Thursday at 4:55 pm, 23.83 million users were connected to it at the same time, or 10,000 more than during the previous peak reached the day before. Never seen !
And France is no exception to the phenomenon. This was found by Shadow, a French company that offers dematerialized computers, that is to say accessible remotely from servers. "Since people are confined, we have an overall increase in connections of 80%. And those during the day have even more than doubled since we have 120% more connections before 5pm," says Yann Carron de la Carrière, director marketing of Shadow, which has 70,000 users in Europe. "These are mostly people who play video games. We are also seeing increases in the use of telework, but video games are really more than double what we saw before confinement."
WHO recommends playing to stay active
We play a lot of video games but we also watch others play. The proof with Twitch, a streaming platform where people are filming live playing. Since the start of containment, its audience has jumped 30%, with an average of nearly two million people connected simultaneously. Hitherto prized almost exclusively for "gamers", Twitch has opened up with the confinement of another audience, notably musicians.
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A social dimension that has not escaped the notice of WHO. The World Health Organization has partnered with major game publishers, including Activision Blizzard ( Call of Duty, World of Warcraft ) for the #PlayApartTogether ("Play separately but together") campaign, which uses video games as support for coronavirus prevention messages. By advising to play the time that the pandemic will last, the WHO hopes to make "millions of people" aware of the merits of containment.
See this post on Instagram
Looking after yourself, your family and friends is important through these stressful times of # COVID19. WHO encourages everyone to #BeActive & #HealthyAtHome by doing some simple & fun physical activities such as: Try exercise classes online Dance to music Play active video games Try skipping rope Do some muscle strength & balance training #coronavirus
A publication shared by World Health Organization (@who) on March 25, 2020 at 3:15 am PDT
A bias that greatly surprised the players since less than a year ago, the WHO included addiction to video games in its classification of recognized diseases. The two messages are not, however, contradictory. The WHO therefore recommends playing with measure and giving priority, if possible, to "active" games that require movement (for example Ring Fit Adventure on Switch or Just Dance 2020 on consoles, PC and smartphone).