The Top Gaming and Lifestyle Trends of 2020
In a year quite like no other, many people spent 2020 focusing on life’s most essential touchstones: video games, internet trends, and tiger documentaries.
If you’re like many individuals, you can’t remember what you had for breakfast today, let alone the most important virtual trends of 2020. Thankfully, the team at Frontierbundles.com did the work for us, collecting the top 20 trends of the year.
Read on to see which trends defined the beginning (or maybe the end) of a decade.
2020’s Biggest Gaming Trends
With more folks forced to stay indoors, virtual trends became the forefront of the year’s cultural buzz. Front and center of the calvary, video games led the year’s virtual charge.
Here are the games and hardware that kept us sane throughout the longest year ever recorded:
Among Us
Part Alien-inspired indie video game, part “Mafia”-esque bluffing showdown, Among Us was one of the year’s hottest gaming hits.
The premise is simple: you control a bean-shaped astronaut character who has to spend precious time completing maintenance tasks throughout your ship. Sounds easy, right? Not quite—one of your “fellow crewmates” is actually a blood-thirsty alien in disguise, determined to pick you and your teammates off one by one.
Although it was released two years prior, Among Us was a videogame smash hit in 2020. It was the most-streamed game in September on Twitch and garnered over 4 billion Among Us-related videos on YouTube.
Whether it was the white-knuckle gameplay or the quality time spent with friends during a strange year, Among Us made the hours speed past in 2020.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
2020 was the year to kick back, relax, and…owe a talking raccoon lots of money? Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a hugely successful 2020 video game release, selling five million virtual sales for the Nintendo Switch console in its first month on the market.
In New Horizons, you play as a cute, customizable character who is the proud owner of a mostly bare island. In an effort to pay back the money you borrowed from Tom Nook—the raccoon mentioned above—you spend time growing crops, catching fish, and growing your little island into a bustling community.
In addition to its impressive sales record, New Horizons garnered some serious star power. United States Representative Alexandria “AOC” Ocasio-Cortez famously tweeted out some questions about the game, hoping to visit other players’ islands.
In a year that occasionally felt all too real, Animal Crossing: New Horizons gave gamers the chance to escape into a cartoon paradise of their own making.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
Imagine taking part in the thrill of an obstacle course-based competition like Wipeout or American Ninja Warrior without any of the accompanying bruises or cold-water plunges. Fall Guys made that dream a reality as one of 2020’s goofiest video games.
In Fall Guys, you play as a cylindrical, squishy, and customizable character tasked with winning an obstacle course game show. You have to jump, dive, and roll your way to the end of a series of mini-competitions to win the overall “show.”
A clever riff on the battle royale video game genre (think Fortnite and PlayerUnkown’s: Battlegrounds), your character cannot come back to life. If you lose a competition, you have to restart your journey in a new show. This mechanic may sound frustrating at first, but it results in pulse-pounding action in the higher rounds of gameplay, where every jump can mean sweet victory or bitter loss.
With seven million units sold on Steam, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout was a massive hit in 2020. Lots of falls, lots of restarts, and lots of laughs: Fall Guys made 2020 even more memorable.
H3: Playstation Five (PS5)
With a months-long hype train behind it, the PS5 was one of the most exciting gaming releases in 2020.
The newest generation of the classic Sony gaming console had everybody talking. Released November 12, the PS5 garnered a Google search volume of 4.6 million. As of January 2021, 4.2 million individual units of the console have been sold.
But was the hype deserved? The PS5 had its fair share of stumbling blocks:
- Few PS5-exclusive games ready by launch
- An unwieldy console size
- A meager amount of internal storage space
As well as some exciting features:
- An impressive list of upcoming PS5-exclusive games
- Updated controllers with cutting-edge “haptic feedback” technology
- Extremely fast load/wait times
The release of the PS5 had gamers spending their 2020 spamming the refresh button of every electronic retailers’ online cart, hoping to get their hands on next-gen technology. Even if you couldn’t get the console in your home, its November release gave fans something to look forward to in 2020.
2020’s Hottest Lifestyle, Food, and Entertainment Trends
Want to dig a little deeper into the lifestyle, food, and entertainment trends that defined 2020? From Dalgona Coffee to TikToK Challenges, check out the infographic below to see which fads ruled the year:
Methodology
Using keywords on Google Trends, the team at Frontierbundles.com searched over 20 hobbies and trends from 2020. The team’s final list consisted of the keywords and trends with the highest search volume for each month.
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