COVID-19: Netflix and Twitter no match for gaming as North America locks down at home

by Mike Usinger on March 23rd, 2020 at 11:00 AM

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As week two of socially isolating ourselves kicks off, now's as good a time as any to reflect on how North America spent its initial days in lockdown at home.

It's not like no one was binge-watching the quite frankly excellent Better Caul Saul on Netflix (trust us—get through Season 1 and you'll be rewarded with something almost as great as Breaking Bad).

And if you were frantically flipping from Twitter to Facebook to Netflix to reassure yourself that you're not alone even though you're kind of alone, well, you probably weren't totally alone.

But where things really took off was gaming. American tech giant Verizon has reported that it saw a 75 percent increase in gaming during peak hours, with social media use remaining flat. When the world is nothing bad news, better to lose yourself in Call of Duty or, for the realists out there, Plague.

In a statement on the company's web site. Verizon chief technology officer Kyle Malady said: "As we see more and more individuals work from home and students engage in online learning, it is a natural byproduct that we would see an increase in web traffic and access to VPN. As more entertainment options are cancelled in communities across the US, an increase in video traffic and online gaming is not surprising."

For a good idea just how much gaming has benefitted from the lockdown, consider that just last month industry-tracking group NPD Group reported that sales of new games, consoles, and accessories were down by 29 percent in February.

Contrast that stagnation to last week, where a spike in demand meant Microsoft's xBox Live crashed for hours on the Monday, and Nintendo online services went down Tuesday for nine hours.

As for what we can expect in the coming weeks, consider how gaming and streaming started to do massive numbers in Italy as COVID-19 began to sweep through the country. From the beginning of February to early march, live streaming on platforms like Twitch and YouTube grew by over 66 percent, with Italian telecommunications titan Telecom Italia seeing traffic increase by 70 percent.