Covid-19 has affected every facet of life as we know it. Freedom, the economy, the mental health of the populace, and everything else. It affected how people could even enjoy their life. Those were the effects on a larger scale but the effects of covid permeated even the most unimportant of spaces. Today, the focus will be an entertainment space.

The video game industry is one entertainment industry that had the most bizarre ramifications from the Covid-19 pandemic. It had its highs, its lows, and it still is being affected even though covid has a much looser grip on the majority of the populace. These effects today could not have happened without the beginning. So let's journey back and see how Covid affected the game industry back in March of 2020.

March saw some massive growth in sales that were unprecedented at the time. Statista says in march alone digital games sales went up nearly 53% with physical game sales having an even larger growth at 82%. These numbers were impressive to say the least but not unexpected. With people locked in their homes with not much to do, it would make sense that more people would want to buy a game or two to pass the time. Games usually last longer than a movie or even shorter tv shows.

However, the rise in video game sales was unmatched in comparison to the rise in console sales. According to Statista, console sales increased 155% in the month of March alone. This increase would be far more shocking than the rise in video game sales. Consoles are far more expensive than the games and with people working less it could be assumed they would not want to spend a ton of money since they wouldn’t know when they could start working again. It goes to show how bored people were even that early on in the pandemic and how desperate they were to pass the time.

This trend would grow higher in April and console sales would increase by another 7%. As the months went on the growth would stagnate and slightly decline but the numbers would stay above how they were pre-pandemic. By June of 2020, there was about a 39% increase in time spent playing video games globally.

Free to play games saw the most massive increase in numbers due to their accessibility. For example, Warzone, a free to play battle royale that was just released in March of 2020, had amassed 30 million players. Call of Duty usually has a large player base from November through December, but by March most of the players have already moved on. This was a huge win for the Call of Duty franchise and shocked the entire industry. Even though the covid-19 pandemic propelled the gaming industry to new heights it could never have dreamed of, it was not all well behind the scenes.

Some cracks would begin to show in the game industry early on in the pandemic. The most notable example would be Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 had a troubled development and release, to say the least. It was in development for years and was set to release in April of 2020 but got delayed…and delayed again…and delayed again until it was finally released in December of 2020. With the three different delays in 2020 alone, you would think it would come out in a hyper-polished state with very minimal issues. However, quite the opposite was true.

The game launched with a plethora of bugs and glitches, cut content that was hyped up for years, and couldn’t even function on certain hardware it released for. Cyberpunk now has a 7.0 audience score on Metacritic and a 78/100 on PC Gamer. While these do not seem like the worst scores, this game was expected to be groundbreaking and online backlash quickly ensued. The PS4 and Xbox one releases were so bad that there were numerous refunds being handed out. This game was only the first of many to be delayed numerous times and release to less than stellar reception. 2021 alone had nearly 70 games be delayed.

One of these included Gotham Knights which has recently been released in October of this year and has also been met with some bad feedback. IGN gave the game a 5/10 while PC Gamer gave it a 49/100. The game released being capped at 30fps (frames per second) on consoles and still had consistent frame drops within the open world. Many criticized its lack of polish. This is a theme of many major game releases since the coronavirus hit in 2020.

This lack of polish stems from the major shift in the game development process. As many jobs chose to do, game developers decided to work from home amidst the pandemic. The game developers' conference did a survey in 2020 asking game developers how their jobs had changed and if it was any harder to work in the conditions they were given. As brought up previously, game delays were prevalent post-pandemic and the survey says nearly 33% of game devs had their games delayed at least once due to covid-19. It says some of the factors causing these delays were poor communication, isolation, and lack of access to critical tools. These setbacks led to less money being made which meant lower budgets for their projects. This would force them to switch up as much of their process as possible to try and cut costs. This was disheartening and frustrating for many devs at the time and had major consequences because of it.

A majority of developers began to feel a lot of burnout from their games. Nearly 41% of developers feel like their productivity declined back in August of 2020 and many still share that sentiment today. Working from home brought more distractions which brought more reasons the mind didn’t want to work. The environment didn’t complement a productive work environment and that showed in many games that would come out down the line like Cyberpunk and Gotham Knights. This work environment also saw 35% of developers feeling that their creativity was lowered. They had far worse communication and far fewer resources to work with. This meant fewer people to bounce ideas off of and fewer means to see any ideas become a reality.

Creativity is the backbone of gaming because gaming is art in a way. It takes genius ideas and a real passion to make a game special. Covid-19 greatly reduced the creative freedom of the industry at large. To devs, covid was a curse but to investors and shareholders, covid was a blessing. Covid made the video game industry rake in more cash than ever before but at the cost of proper working conditions. Now that the industry has made so much money they never want to go back to the old revenue pre-pandemic. Now developers have to pump out far more games in a far shorter time span to keep the money coming in and each product is released in far worse states with much less creativity. Covid made the gaming industry have its highest peak but is slowly draining its life as we speak.