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The COVID’19 pandemic and its lockdown had heavily impacted the workforce by creating job vacancies or forcing people to work in unsafe conditions while the pandemic was raging. The work difficulties and issues related to the pandemic saw the shift to a work-from-home culture. Work-from-home solved the issue of declining employment and created additional job opportunities for all. The UK experienced 17.4% of workers doing their jobs from home in 2020 while the US and Italy had 14.5% of workers and 31.6% of workers doing work from home in 2020 and 2021 respectively. While popular sites such as bigwinwall.com, reported significantly higher traffic, social media gaming was also on a rise.
How Employers Benefited from WFH
The work-from-home culture benefits employers with reduced expenditure on the commute, flexible schedules, better productivity, and the most craved of all, extra time. Hence, the gaming industry has seen a rapid rise in gamers between the ages of 18-40 who can spend their time and money on social media gaming. The video game industry is expected to see a turnover of $221 billion in 2023 with 2776 million verified users around the world. Multiple new games peaked in popularity during the lockdown including games like Among Us, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft, a favorite of young working adults. Animal Crossing earned $180 million worth of revenue by 2021 while Among Us earned around $86 million in revenue since its inauguration in 2018.
Retro Gaming Tends on a Rise Across the Markets
Retro gaming trends also saw an emergence with the rising work-from-home culture. PS4 and PS5 games returned to the market with new gaming studios and independent game developers getting employed in these sectors due to increased demand. Nintendo and Tencent had boosted sales by 41% and 31% compared to the years prior to the lockdown and work-from-home culture. In fact, the pandemic delayed the rate of game production by 33% and suppliers could not fulfill the demands of players. And gaming gadgets and accessory sales were shooting up on Amazon.
Games for Stress-Relief Amidst the COVID Chaos
Games like Valorant, PUBG, and Free Fire gained more popularity with male players and served as major stress relief for them. For women, Gacha games were preferred and Genshin Impact was declared a fan favorite by the majority of women players. Added to that games played on social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and Youtube Game Streaming has seen a profit and is estimated to have grown by 20% after 2020. Downloading and live streaming’s steep rise has also been recorded as Twitch recorded billions in streaming hours in 2021 alone. Thus, with social gaming, live streaming of games also garnered huge popularity.
However, the e-sporting community faced a slight disadvantage with the work-from-home culture since the lockdown. Although racking millions in streams, the revenue from sponsorships and advertisements had been drastically reduced as the general public preferred staying home as a means of precaution instead of ticketing for the game. It was overcome quickly through live streaming and adapting to the new form of life.
Social media gaming through the rise in users has opened up job opportunities for game developers, software and sound engineers, game writer, graphic designer, character and gameplay animators, and VFX artists, and has created new jobs of discord moderators, game analysts, individual producer, concept writer, and more.
Conclusion
It is expected that employers may return to their offline jobs and the percentage of players may fall in coming years yet in reality most players prefer online modes of working over the offline mode and may continue to do so. The gaming industry can reach a 34.9% user mark by 2027 and it is predicted through statistics.
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