Gaming Services Like Twitch, Discord Are Booming
It’s not just Zoom. Social chat and streaming apps are seeing a surge in new users.
Sean Kelly was recently furloughed from a job at Formula One that had allowed him to travel frequently from San Diego to see his 12-year-old son who lives with his mother in South Carolina. With less money for plane tickets and more restrictions in place as a result of the spreading coronavirus pandemic, he was looking for a way to maintain the relationship. Video calls alone felt flat. “We just might be on another planet from each other,” Kelly remembers saying to himself, as he wondered how to stay in touch with Ciarán.
So in mid-March, Kelly, 39, signed up for Discord—a video-chat app for gamers he runs on his phone—and for Minecraft, the popular world-building game that he turns on simultaneously on his iPad. Now father and son go hunting for virtual diamonds almost every afternoon while video chatting.