How Will The Pandemic Affect MMOs?

I generally try to keep real life off this blog, but the current worldwide "situation" is one of these things that's hard to compartmentalise, so I thought I'd get my one blog post on the subject out of the way.

On a personal level I remain safe and healthy for the time being and hope to continue to do so - I'm not sure I'm in a high risk group as I don't currently suffer from lung problems, but I have a past history of having them, and I'm not sure how that plays into things. Fortunately I'm one of those lucky people with jobs that can be done from home and have therefore been working from home for the past week and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Mr Commando is a so-called "key worker" and has to keep going out, but he's doing his best to not bring any germs home.

On a personal level, this staying home has actually been a good thing for me (aside from the sudden lack of exercise, which is something I need to work on). It means that I save both time and money that would usually be spent on commuting, meaning that I have more time to do things I like, such as play MMOs and blog, yay! Also, unlike that of many of my co-workers, my social life isn't really impacted as I'm used to spending my evenings chatting on TeamSpeak anyway.

That said, I can't help but wonder how the situation is going to affect the games I play. I'm sure game developers are tech savvy enough to enable remote working for most of their employees, and what hardware maintenance may be required can probably be carried out without risk to anyone's health and safety, though I wouldn't be surprised if something like a server going down suddenly took longer to fix in the future.

On the surface, online gaming should also be in a pretty good spot business-wise, as people staying home are more likely to seek safe refuge and entertainment in virtual worlds instead of their usual haunts. On the other hand though, with hundreds of thousands of people losing jobs and suddenly finding themselves without income, they may well have to cut back on non-essential spending which would result in less income for gaming companies. I suppose only the people seeing the numbers on the other end can tell for sure right now whether the result is a net win or loss for them.

I've also been wondering about whether the content of our virtual homes will be affected in any way. I work in marketing and know we have to be very careful with what we say at the moment as you have both people who are understandably worried about how every entity they interact with handles the situation, and those who are (also understandably) sick of getting emails from every business they ever bought from about how that business handles COVID-19. So you have to acknowledge the situation somehow as it would feel weird to pretend that everything is business as usual, but you also don't want to be seen as saying anything inappropriate or trying to profiteer from people's suffering.

What made me think about this in SWTOR in specific were the rakghouls. I was in Kaon Under Siege the other night and when we got to the conversation with Major Byzal, one of the pugs in the group said: "Is this coronavirus?" I just responded with: "Shh, don't say that or they'll cancel the rakghoul event."

I expect that not many MMOs happen to have in-game events that use the concept of a deadly pandemic for entertainment, but I suppose they might still have certain content that might deal with the subject. I doubt that regular players care greatly either way, but let's just say I don't find it hard to imagine that someone new to the game might encounter the Rakghoul Resurgence in game, see quests like the daily to infect several people with the plague and find it highly inappropriate and off-putting under the circumstances. If I was Bioware I think I'd quietly cross that one off the calendar for at least the next couple of months just to be on the safe side. It's not like they don't have enough other events to run in the meantime.