Hacker News Reader

Comment by thickbill | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how video game sales will be affected by COVID-19. Anecdotally, I've noticed all my friends who were never previously interested are now messaging me about setting up group matches in Age of Empire, Fortnite, Civilization.

View on HN

CS: GO just broke an all time record [0] for the concurrent players recently.

Gaming industry is doing well.

[0] https://invisioncommunity.co.uk/csgo-breaks-a-record-with-ov...

There was an interview with Valve's Gabe Newell a day or two ago where he said something like "Entertainment industries will either think about how they adapt to this now, or they will wish they had adapted later"

I know there's several sales going on right now (GOG even has a nice selection of games discounted to free to get started). https://www.gog.com/partner/stay_at_home Anecdotally my twitter feed seems to have more people gaming now than normal. Empirically, steam stats show a marked increase in logged in users and those playing games: https://steamdb.info/graph/

itch.io also has had a whole bunch of devs drop their prices or make their games free for the moment.

https://itch.io/c/757294/games-to-help-you-stay-inside

On Tuesday afternoon Lichess (a popular free and open source chess service) showed a notification that they're "dealing with connection issues due to peak online users".

The live stats panel showed around 60k players in around 25k games.

Is it just rounding, or is there some way for more than two players to participate in a game?

Likely people are observing games.

What about the implications on bandwidth as well? Internet will be pushed to its limits in streaming and teleconferencing, among other things.

At least for streaming, most big, non-realtime, streaming platforms like YouTube or Netflix have caching inside ISP networks, to limit the requirements on the global network.

I think this already happened back in february during the chinese lockdown. I remember the google forms we were using suddenly started changing every time someone submitted a form, the data they entered would replace the field labels.

I've already noticed issues in my inner ring suburb. During the business day, my 200Mb Charter cable connection is only pulling 20-50Mb. I've never had capacity issues in the last 10 years.

Similar anecdote from me; it's been much easier to get friends together for an online game night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com