How Much Gaming’s Increased During Lockdown

There’s no question that Covid-19 has impacted a lot of aspects of our lives - the biggest being the current lockdown ongoing in several different countries. Many industries and businesses are massively affected, but I’d say the industry that has changed the most is the gaming industry. During a period where people have a lot more free time and a lot more people are looking for distractions during this distressing ordeal, the videogame industry is thriving.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past month or two, you’d be aware that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been taking the gaming world by a storm, with a lot of people choosing to spend their lockdown immersing themselves into the game. I don’t know about anyone else, but my social media feed was full of more posts about Animal Crossing, than it was about the ever-growing pandemic, and you can see why that might have been the case, when you realise that it was topping the UK charts in its first week of release!

Steam has also shown a mass increase in how many people are online and playing games at the same time as well. At the time of writing, the peak of the amount of people online that day was 23,474,236! The ten top most played games at any one point were:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1,204,257)
• Dota 2 (737,658)
• PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (505,404)
• Grand Theft Auto V (171,147)
• Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege (142,540)
• Football Manager 2020 (115,227)
• Monster Hunter: World (107,426)
• ARK: Survival Evolved (101,310)
• Source SDK Base 2007 (96,375)
• Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (77,937)

As you can probably imagine a lot of these games are also popular on Twitch streams (and more recently, Facebook streams), and with so many people at home with nothing else to watch, there’s been a lot of opportunity in people making money in this too with betting. With ESL and other leagues hopping onto the current bandwagon of making the most of this lockdown, a lot of people are watching and betting on these streams.

You can find a listing of games to bet on such as Rainbow Six Siege thanks to sites such as vulkanbet.com/en/rainbow-six, which let you place multiple bets at once, and even watch streams right there on the site!

So, with no football or rugby teams to put your stakes on, why don’t you try your hand at betting on esport teams for games such as Rainbow Six Siege?