Video game playing has increased 40% with COVID-19

This is a follow up post from my first post on changes in video game playing since COVID 19 began. It’s been about 7 weeks since then, so how are things looking in the world of video games? We had seen a massive spike in gaming as people just started to stay home. A week after the post I wrote New Zealand went into level 4 complete lock down. Many US states and European countries put in place stay at home orders around the same time. So how did this impact video game playing?

Analysis-wise I did things a little differently so the data would make more sense. I measured the change in gaming as as change in percent from the average. So a value of 0% would mean your average day while a value of 50% would mean a 50% increase in the number of people playing video games from the average of that day of the week.

The effects of people staying at home continue to be seen. Since the start of April, where most people were under some sort of movement restriction, there has been a 40% increase in gaming on a given day. Looking back, the highest day from my last post (March 16th) isn’t even on the top of the scale anymore! March 16th was 20% above average. Instead, April the 13th saw the largest % change at 55%. This is likely due to people taking a long Easter weekend.

Getting back to normal?

As you can see above the peak of gaming seems to be behind us, peaking around the end of March/start of April and lasting until Easter. Indeed, if we average across weeks we can see a slight trend downwards as people get acclimated to working at home, run out of games to play, and head back to work. However, we’re still at about 35% above average, about what you would see during the Christmas break. It’ll be interesting to see how much longer it takes to get back to normal, if ever! It’ll be interesting to look back at historic data to see how correlated video gaming playing is with some economic indicators like GDP and unemployment.