The coronavirus is also affecting the game devs.
eSports Charts says that Twitch’s viewership has nearly doubled in March than a year ago: last week, Twitch had an average of 2.2 million concurrent viewers, which is far more than what the site had in February or March 2019 (about 1.18 million at that time). On TwitchTracker we see that the most popular game on Twitch is League of Legends (and the viewers spent a collective 28,264,690, yes, over 28 million hours watching LoL last week!), followed by Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto V. We can expect Call of Duty Warzone to blow into the charts in a few days, and it could also increase Twitch’s viewership and user activity.
In Italy – where the schools and workplaces are mostly closed at the moment -, Telecom Italia has noticed that the Internet traffic has increased by about 70%, and Bloomberg reports that it was mostly thanks to online games, such as Fortnite. Akamai, a content delivery network, says that in the past 60 days, the average Internet traffic has increased by 29%. (United States: +19, India: +13%, Japan: +7%, Australia: +5%.) And the stock markets are crashing…
Nintendo of America’s statement reveals that one of its employees got the coronavirus, and those who had contact with this employee are now in self-quarantine, regardless if they have symptoms or not: „Nintendo of America is supporting this individual as they recover and will continue to take precautions to safeguard the health and well-being of all our employees and the broader community.” The employees from California and Washington states are allowed to work from home to reduce the risk of them contracting the virus.
So the game industry also takes a blow because of the virus – all we have to say that no E3 this year! (We wrote about it previously.) Other events are also getting cancelled or delayed, and who knows when the situation will improve.
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