Video games and conference tools: the tech benefiting from COVID-19

While isolated gamers fight their own virtual battles, on the frontlines of the fight against the virus in hospital wards, doctors are connecting with patients remotely via telemedicine platforms.

Telecommuting tools

And on a larger scale in the home offices of locked-down cities across the world, white collar workers are newly reliant on web conferencing and collaboration tools — Skype, Slack, WeChat Work, and Zoom — to stay productive.

Business apps have been booming, with global downloads jumping from 1.4 million across both the App Store and Google Play at the beginning of January, to 6.7 million in the first week of March according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.

Zoom Video Communications has emerged as a frontrunner amidst the crisis, with

the daily active user base growing by 67 per cent since early January, according to data from Apptopia.

The ‘stay-at-home’ sector

The ‘social distancing’ regime that is rapidly becoming the new global normal is moving more of life online.

Instead of picking up groceries on a crowded high street or supermarket, shoppers are ordering products on the internet, leading e-commerce to surge. Amazon alone reports having to recruit 100,000 extra workers to cope with the coronavirus-induced demand.

In place of gym trips, the quarantined are streaming fitness classes to their home, leading to increased demand for subscription-based online workout systems. To capitalize on this,

online cycling platform Peloton Interactive has introduced a 90-day free trial.

And, to break the monotony of staying at home all week, those stuck indoors are escaping into a virtual world of video games.

Online game marketplace Steam hit an all-time high in the number of users online during the weekend of March 14, and strategy games mimicking the virus situation have been given a new lease of life. Pandemic 2, a browser-based Flash game released in 2008, is one such game that has reported a spike in the number of users.

This morbid brand of entertainment has even extended into the crypto world.

From the developers of CoronaCoin—a macabre cryptocurrency that burns tokens in a bid to boost their value each time someone dies of the virus—we have Plague ETH. This makes use of the token in an Ethereum-based strategy game where the winner infects the most people.

Meanwhile, as experts predict a ‘baby boom’ from the coronavirus quarantine, a crypto-collectible game named CoronaBabies is trying to capitalize on the virus. CoronaBabies, are ‘infected’ bat illustrations that have begun trading on Ethereum.

But while an Icelandic bat named Rune might have recently changed hands for 1.2 ETH, the idea hasn’t yet taken off, and some in the community have termed the project ‘amoral’ — another section of the economy, like toilet paper and surgical masks, that is unfortunately buoyed by the virus.