The pandemic has resulted in the entire world spending far more time indoors than they used to. This has been fantastic for the video game industry as Steam continues to break concurrent user records along with multiple titles ranging from consoles to PC.
While game development studios and publishers have been experiencing a roaring ignition of interest, making video games more popular than ever, other companies have been forced to handle the additional load to the best of their ability. With the modern era of interconnectivity, video games receiving an across-the-board increase in engrossment has made internet companies note an increase in traffic and the vast majority is reportedly coming from entertainment. Comcast has released their network report for 2020, attempting to highlight the level at which they "supported the public" during this pandemic.
Comcast notes that peak traffic increased by 32% compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2020, with entertainment dominating the traffic as a whole. 71% of Comcast's network was video streaming alone, with Twitch and other services offering consumers a leisure activity. Online gaming and downloads accounted for only 10% of the downstream traffic in 2020, noting within its report that they saw a 20-to-80% increase in gaming downloads.
Comcast triumphantly states that their reported "years of strategic investment in the network paid off" as they invested $15 billion in network improvements between 2017 and 2020. Paid for by the government offering well over a billion dollars in November of 2020 alone, government subsidies, Comcast forcing data caps onto customers, and a sweeping number of tax cuts from the first year of the previous administration's time in office. This is a marked turn from March of 2020, when AT&T joined with Comcast to remove data caps.
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen took Comcast to task on Twitter recently, noting the new data caps during a pandemic were akin to exploitation when the government has offered hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars towards the ISPs over the past decade. The data caps are neither referenced within Comcast's preening press release nor have they been taken to task by the new US administration. The increase of lobbying expenditures by Comcast from 2019 to 2020 to the tune of $1,070,000 (a total expenditure in 2020 of $14,430,000, as reported by OpenSecrets) and hiring of additional lobbyists to enforce their policies and desires by proxy are also noticeably absent.
The internet is now arguably more vital to a nation than ever before, and this will only increase with time. Videos are streaming in higher quality, games are becoming larger, and we become increasingly more interconnected with each week as a species. With the growth of the Internet of Things, where multiple devices now connect to the internet, internet usage seems primed to be used at a greater level, year after year, regardless of whether or not the ISPs play by the same rules of the citizens that it services.
Source: Comcast, OpenSecrets