According to Stefen Hall, project lead, media, entertainment and culture, at the World Economic Forum (WEF), US telco Verizon found an increase of 75% in gaming traffic during peak hours from March 10 to 17 amid the Covid-19 lockdown, compared to increases of 12% in digital video traffic and 20% in web traffic during 1Q2020 as a whole. Livestream software firm Streamlabs also discovered that platforms like Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming have seen usage hours surge by 20% across all services as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Gaming giant EA Sports experienced a 15.9% return in 1H2020, beating US benchmark indices like the Dow, the S&P 500 and the MSCI US, all of which fell due to the Covid-19 shock.
With Covid-19 accelerating the speed of digitalisation, talking heads just cannot stop talking about epoch-defining technology like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and e-commerce.
Yet according to New York-based fund management firm Global X, there is one sector that may have flown somewhat under the radar — gaming and esports. Locked at home and deprived of sports on television, people are turning to gaming to entertain themselves.
