At the beginning of the confinement, Spain again sang the hit Resistiré del Dúo Dinámica. But he also returned to the most popular board game, the one that has been in every Spanish home for five years: Parcheesi. Surprisingly, the most downloaded game from both Android and Apple is the Parchis STAR: since March 16 the downloads of this free virtual parcheesi have skyrocketed, with two million in the Google Play Store and more than 700,000 in the Apple Store .

During the running of the bulls, Spain looks back with a nostalgic point and has recovered a tradition on smart phones and tablets . Meanwhile, in France, the United Kingdom and Italy, one of the most downloaded games is the international Mario Kart Tour, in addition to other entertainment apps or the classic Trivial .

The Spanish were already the main users of the Parchis STAR, an app developed by a small Indian company, Gameberry Labs, and published on Android and Apple in September 2017. The Gameberry Labs study, founded by two young engineers from Bangalore ( the hight tech capital of India), has only created two apps: Parchis STAR and Ludo Superstar. Ludo and Parcheesi are variants of the same game, with practically the same board, except that two dice are used in ludo. Both are descended from a traditional game from ancient India, Pachisi. While Parcheesi was the western adaptation, with special fury in Spain, ludo remained in the east (in fact, the Ludo Superstar is a success in Pakistan).

THE 'ANIMAL CROSSING' PHENOMENON

'Animal Crossing: New Horizons' is the ninth installment in the series.

Parcheesi is back on mobiles and tablets, yes. But new generations are no stranger to the Animal Crossing effect . , a life simulation game. In other words, there is no objective or mission: simply to live - which includes buying - on this happy island with a naïve and cartoon aesthetic, interacting with other characters.

On March 20, Nintendo released the ninth installment in the saga: ' New Horizons . And it has already unleashed madness around the world: Nintendo Switch stocks have been depleted almost everywhere in the world. In Spain, stores and department stores -Mediamarky, Game, Fnac, CorteIngles, etc.- no longer have units. On Amazon and Ebay, the Switch is increased in price above 400 euros (its official price is 329 euros).

At the end of January, with the closure of China, the president of the Japanese company, Shuntaro Furukawa , already warned that Nintendo could not meet all the demand by producing the components of its devices in China (to a lesser extent in Vietnam). The Switch has been a great success for Nintendo : a hybrid of portable and desktop console that has already dethroned PlayStation (focused on the launch of the new PS5) and Xbox.

Since the beginning of the quarantine, the sale of consoles in Spain has skyrocketed: during the first week of confinement (from March 16 to 22) they grew by 27.7% and, in the second, the increase was 66.1% according to data from Games Sales Data (GSD). The figures in Italy and France are similar. Although GSD has yet to release the titles of the best-selling video games for March, Animal Crossing promises to unseat Sony's leadership during the month of February ( Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and FIFA 20, all from PS4). This has happened in Game's specialty stores: in just 10 days Animal Crossing has already become the best-selling video game of March, ahead of FIFA 20 .

Record of online users

Counter Strike: Global Offensive from 2012 continues to break records.

The STEAM platform, one of the most popular to play online, has broken the records of its history with more than 23 million users a day. And spikes of more than a million people playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , the mythical 2012 shooter (much more popular than Grand Theft Auto V, for example, which borders on 200,000 simultaneous users). These are global figures in which Spain barely represents 1%: the United States and China dominate the consumption of games.

Video games (in fair measure) have been recommended by the WHO to face quarantine. In late March, he even seconded the industry initiative #PlayApartTogether. In Spain, we will always have Parcheesi.

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