With about 50-60 customers playing at a time, these public gaming platforms in cramped up places, without proper ventilation, may defeat the lockdown’s purpose.
Bhubaneswar: Abreak in the midst of rigorous exams schedule has come as a great relief to students in the city. Resultantly, gaming parlours in the city are making huge money hand over fist as gamers have lined up waiting for their turns. “Usually, this is an off-season for us as most exams are round the corner and we get 16-20 customers a day. However, from last week the number has gone up to 3040 gamers and in evenings there is hardly any system vacant,” said Sumit Pattnaik, owner and manager of a local gaming parlour.
With about 50-60 customers playing at a time, these public gaming platforms in cramped up places, without proper ventilation, may defeat the lockdown’s purpose.“Apart from poor ventilation and confined spaces, the keyboards and optical mouse come in contact with multiple users in very small amount of time. It’s basically impossible for the owners to clean the system after every single use and thus they are virtually waiting for a disaster,” said Rashmi Mohanty, a general physician here. Responding to this, Prem Chandra Chaudhary, Commissioner, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) said that the matter is being look into and they will issue a notice for the parlours’ closure soon.
As the unprecedented outbreak of novel cornonavirus (COVID-19) grips the world, panic and paranoia are spreading like wildfire. While some want to stock enough sanitisers, others have rushed to buy facemasks to fight the pandemic. However, a certain age-group has different objective to achieve and wants to make the most of the troubled times. So, who are they? Gamers! With more than 1.8 lakh cases and 7,499 deaths all across the world, COVID-19 forced governments to promote social distancing leading to companies issuing Work From Home (WFH) and shutdowns of schools and colleges. Meaning, a lot more time inside playing videogames, and now we are seeing some metrics starting to reflect that. If numbers from SteamDB— an online digital games marketplace— are to be believed, Steam (an app to distribute games and related media online) has registered all-time high users online during the weekend of March 14.
More than 20.3 million simultaneous players were online on the afternoon of March 15. This is a new record over the previous high of around 19 million, which was only achieved about a month ago. During this period, ‘CounterStrike: Global Offensive’ reached one million concurrent players March 14. This was the third game on Steam to achieve the feat after Valve’s ‘DOTA 2’ and Ubisoft’s ‘Rainbow Six: Siege’. While most schools are expected to be closed anywhere from two weeks to a month, starting the previous week, experts believe that COVID-19 may be a boost to the video game industry in terms of playtime and possibly may see exponential revenue growth.
Meanwhile, still taking it baby steps into the industry, the Indian gaming industry has also seen a sudden surge due to recent outbreak of the virus. According to the latest State of Online Gaming’s research report on worldwide consumers’ gaming behaviours and expectations, Indians are binge-gaming longer than ever before, with a whopping 10 per cent spike in games being played from 2019 which is an average of four hours and eight minutes.
“There is virtually no socialising presently. People don’t even have an option of playing outdoor sports. While the Indian gaming community is still largely into mobile gaming, sales of console and PC games such as ‘Warzone’, ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Call of Duty’ has registered a huge growth during the last 15 days. Telecommunications have also reported surge in traffic during these times,” said Pawan Awasthi, Nvidia, Head Enterprise Marketing Asia South and gaming expert.
The report also suggested that global respondents, aged 18 to 25, binge-play for an average ofsix hours and 34 minutes, 11 per cent longer than a year ago. Also, nearly one in ten Indians (9 per cent) say that they’ve played for more than 10 hours at a time.
AVIRAL MISHRA, OP
