Online party games are helping cure the coronavirus lockdown blues in China
Murder mysteries and draw-and-guess games are popular online during the Covid-19 epidemic as social game downloads surge
Each morning over the past month, Evan Wan has been regularly setting up meetings with his friends. But these aren’t your usual catch-ups.
Wan, like millions of others in China, has found himself quarantined at home because of the coronavirus outbreak.To continue having some semblance of a social life, he has been catching up with friends, meeting new people and even networking with potential business contacts by playing party games online.
Wan and his friends are hardly the only ones. A new report from AppAnnie shows that old-school social and puzzle games with a virtual twist have risen in popularity during the epidemic.
Five of these games shot up to the top 100 in Apple’s mainland China iOS App Store in the three weeks after January 20, the day Chinese health authorities confirmed the Covid-19 disease could be transmitted person-to-person. One “draw and guess game,” a type of virtual Pictionary, ranked among the top 20 apps with a tenfold increase in downloads over the previous month.
