Online Gaming

If you’re a parent of a kid between 8 and 18 you’re intimately familiar with this subject. If you’re an adult under 45 you likely are as well. That’s a whole lot of folks, which is a big reason why online gaming is such a raging success. The history of the “sport” (in quotations because a debate rages as to whether you can classify mouse-clicking as a sporty endeavor) dates back to 1940. The city was New York and Dr. Edward Uhler Condon introduced a mathematical game called Nim to attendees of the New York World Fair. Nim was promptly played by 50,000 plus people during the first six months and the computer triumphed in roughly 90% of the games.

The next couple decades saw immense gaming growth, but the world was officially put on notice when in 1972 Atari burst on to the scene. This then led to arcades, personal computers, Commodore 64, Nintendo, Sega, Xbox, etc. Today, and due in large part to the computing power the Internet brings to the table, a whole new wave of games and graphics and consoles have been made available. An impressive 3.2 billion people worldwide have access to the Internet, and of those, 1.5 billion are engaging in online gaming! This stat caught everyone a bit off-guard – 1.5 billion! That is an impressive amount of people sitting and clicking, many of which are also enjoying a beverage or 7.

A gaming report put out by the famed ESA revealed that 54% of frequent gamers feel online gaming helps them to connect more frequently with friends, and another 45% use the platforms to connect directly with family. In 2020 there is a mind-numbing amount of platforms to engage in online gaming. Steam is likely the most popular, offering over 100 games per week that span a real breadth of genres – visual novels, shooters, auto racing, it’s endless with Steam. Now, many major publishers (Bethesda, Activision, Electronic Arts among others) are moving away from Steam in an attempt to draw their players on to their own platforms. This is working to some extent, but if you want variety and are not playing the same game necessarily day in and day out, Steam is still a solid option.

GOG Galaxy, otherwise known as Good Old Games, was originally conceived for old school, retro games. While that worked for a while, GOG have evolved since then and are now venturing into Steam-like territory. Microsoft (they always find their way in don’t they) rolled out the beta version of the Xbox and it has received mix reviews. First, the catalogue is not all that extensive, and while better than Microsoft Store the sleek interface is still a gaming favorite. And lastly, Epic Games Store. This is a work in progress with massive upside, but it is not there at the level of the previous three quite yet. Epic Games as a publisher is world-renowned which is why people were going nuts over this initially. But the search function is still a bit clunky and the social networking basic at best. But watch out, as soon as Epic turns the corner, they’ll be a load to handle.

There were many that wrote off online gaming. Just like rap music in the 80s, all of our parents that exclaimed that “simple music” will never catch on. Someone tell Jay Z that as he is sitting in quarantine on a $200 million yacht. Online gaming isn’t going anywhere.