Christophe De bont 
20/03/2020The current coronacrisis is a trying time for everyone. Children can’t go to school. Families aren’t allowed to see each other. Blooming love is nipped in the bud because of quarantine. The streets are empty and the economy is bleeding. It’s not a pretty picture and it doesn’t look like it’ll be over soon.
But there’s a silver lining to this crisis as well. Facing a common enemy, people are rallying together more than ever to help beat this virus. The internet is teeming with initiatives to support our health care workers and make sure the elderly aren’t pining away from loneliness. Hell, we’re even using the power of our GPU’s to help researchers in the fight against coronavirus. It’s not in our nature to be socially isolated, and technology has given us the power to be human even when we’re not able to physically be together.
There’s an important role for video games here. To help people stay inside, the best strategy to win this war, a lot of developers are chiming in with irresistible game offers. High profile indie developers like Vlambeer and Terry Cavanagh gave away thousands of free games, and there’s still a nice selection of free or heavily discounted indie games to be found on itch.io and GOG also has a nice list of classic games that are completely free.
The #BelgianGamesIndustry has a few examples of its own. We’re always proud of our members, but this time we’re particularly happy that Next Apps has made its award-winning games Sevn, Colorcube and Toddler Zoo free on the App Store, and Sakari Games is giving away pre-release codes of their upcoming game Trailer Trashers: Shotgun Sports over on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the games based learning experts over at Play It Safe have created a free 5 minute game (link in Dutch) to learn more about the coronavirus and how to best protect yourself against it. There’s also great timing by another of our members Bart Bonte, who has just released the follow-up to his award-winning puzzle game Blue. Green is the colour of hope, and the world can use some of that right now.
These are all great initiatives but we feel like we can do even more! If you can contribute to make people’s time social distancing easier in any way, please consider joining the fight with a limited giveaway or crazy discount. The power of video games is unmatched and now’s the time to really show that to the world.
