DIGITAL VIDEO GAME REVENUE HIT USD 10 BILLION DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Digital video game spending hit record-breaking numbers in March as consumers started turning to games while following stay-at-home orders placed amid the coronavirus pandemic. Revenue topped USD 10 billion last month, the highest-ever for a single month, and an 11% increase year-over-year, according to Nielsen's SuperData reports. Spending on premium console and PC games rose sharply in March, up 64% month-to-month, from USD 883 million to USD 1.5 billion, and 56%, from USD 363 million to USD 567 million. Mobile games also did well, with revenue and spending rising at 15% year-over-year to USD 5.7 billion in March. TiMi and Tencent's Honor of Kings held the top spot, while several other leading mobile titles saw revenue rise, including Niantic's Pokemon Go, which topped USD 111 million in March, an 18% increase month-over-month.

The most recent offering in the Call of Duty franchise, the free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone that launched on 10 March, also benefited from the home restrictions. Warzone, a new add-on mode to 2019's best-selling title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, increased monthly active users in the game by more than 150%, peaking at nearly 63 million active players. One of March’s other releases, Bethesda and id Software's Doom Eternal, also performed well, selling 3 million digital copies last month, three times more than its predecessor, the 2016's Doom. Rogers stated that there was a 64% increase in game consoling, the fastest-growing industry, between February to March alone, according to Superdata's report. "We've been tracking this industry for many years," Superdata Analyst Carter Rogers said. "Digital spending has been gradually going up year-over-year, but this is the biggest month we've ever seen."

Some of the reasons why the industry may have experienced the spike include the multiplayer feature, which allows people to socialize while they stay at home with “Warzone,” a free-to-play mode added to “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” in March, which boosted the game's monthly active users by 159% to 62.7 million. SuperData estimates that Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," a calming game where your character simply hangs out on an island, sold more digital units in a single month than any other console game in history, pegging the total at 5 million. Virtual reality headsets faced shortages as a result of the outbreak, but the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx still managed to draw in 860,000 players. "We're going to continue to see this growth in player base and viewership that has been growing exponentially over the past decade," said Jason Lake, Chief Executive of Complexity Gaming. 

However, many large gaming companies have suffered a negative impact from the pandemic. Nintendo ends its earnings season on 31st March and will announce its fiscal performance on 7th May. Gaming was touted as "recession-proof" during the 2008 financial crisis. Gaming stocks are up across the board, even for hardware makers like Nintendo. One game company is not recession-proof, though: GameStop. The already struggling retailer announced this week it'd be cutting salaries, including a 50% cut for its CEO. Sony has decided to delay one of its biggest games of the year, The Last of Us Part II, a game about a deadly pandemic that was set to launch in May. At the time, Sony said "logistically, the global crisis is preventing us from providing the launch experience our players deserve," likely valuing non-existent brick-and-mortar sales.