Paris, April 1st, 2020 – The crisis we are going through is unprecedented in many ways, with containment as one of the most striking components. Beyond the concerns that everyone has for themselves and loved ones, confinement has accentuated at least two fundamental trends in our society: the explosion of gaming and streaming usage. This is an expected consequence of this crisis, which is now quantifiable and visible through Shadow – the cloud computing company that provides users with a cloud-based gaming PC.
With containment, users’ free time increased significantly, resulting in more time spent on Shadow. Thus, the number of connections to Shadow surged, increasing every day a little more as the measures hardened, until confinement became total (+50% of daily connections to the service).
Since stricter rules were implemented, these figures are particularly high during the day. Usually gamers play more often in the evening or at night, but since they've been locked up at home during the day, the number of sessions before 5 p.m. has almost doubled.
The last lesson learned from analyzing these data points: the use of Shadow mirrors different national situations when comparing countries. We observed the sharpest increase in service usage in countries that first enforced stay-at-home policies. In France, the number of connections spiked first. This was followed by rapid increase in the UK, which quickly outpaced Germany after confinement policies went into effect last week, and is now on a trajectory to surpass France at its current rate.
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