With much of the planet practicing social estrangement or quarantine the hashtag #QuedateEnCasa as a flag, it is to be expected that, between books and home office, activities related to streaming and virtual entertainment will sting in point. And the audience did not disappoint, because this weekend record levels of audience were reached on several of the most important gaming platforms on the planet. Italy, one of the countries that has suffered the most from the impact of the virus, has established total isolation for its inhabitants, and the younger ones (and not so much) decided to spend the hours with video games. As Bloomberg reports, data traffic increased exponentially since school closures, largely due to the growth in demand for online gaming.” We noticed an increase of more than 70 percent of internet traffic on the network,” Telecom Italia CEO Luigi Gubitosi told the portal. “With a great contribution from online games like Fortnite.” The case of Italy is not unique. Steam, the PC gaming platform par excellence, recorded an all-time peak of more than 20 million connected users, with a record 6.4 million simultaneous active players. The information, available on the Steam DB query platform, also confirms that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) recorded an all-time high of more than one million concurrent players during that period. CS:GO has seen sustained growth over the past month, since isolation was ordered in China and users turned to competitive play.
Steam broke user records over the weekend Picture: SteamDB
Xbox Live, the Xbox One online service, logged issues over the weekend, even though Microsoft hasn’t confirmed that it was due to the extraordinary traffic that the network had to support. On last night the service stopped working for a few hours, preventing users from connecting to their accounts or finding games online. The company solved it in just over two hours, but it will surely have to allocate more resources in the days to come, as more countries add to the isolation. On the other hand Pokémon GO, Niantic’s augmented reality mobile game, introduced some changes to allow its users to continue capturing creatures without leaving or getting too far away from home. The company eliminated the need to walk to trigger certain events, increased the effect of Pokémon-attracting elixirs, and expanded the type of creatures that appear in certain areas to make them easier to find.” The safety of our global community is our priority. COVID-19 challenges us and the world to adjust,” the company said on the official website. In this note:
