 Welcome to World Versus Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the COVID-19 outbreak. This week, video games. Already the biggest sector of the global entertainment industry, and the pandemic means it's just getting bigger. Millions and millions played online. Only 200 qualifies for the Fortnite World Cup finals and this is the last game. In a world where sport has been put in lockdown, will e-sports replace physical games? Simply put, e-sports is watching other people play video games. Depending on who you are and perhaps how old you are, that idea either sounds as natural as watching golf or football on TV, or it's one of the weirdest ways of spending your leisure time that you've ever heard. The question I've been asked by people like Asian Older for the past 15 years has been why would anybody want to watch other people play video games? You know, and the answer is why would anyone want to watch grown men chase a small ball around a perfectly good grass field? Just in terms of the foundation that e-sports is built on, it's literally far and away the largest sector of the overall global entertainment industry. Now that pretty much my whole day is clear, I pretty much just play all day. I could get up in the morning, get online, and then not get offline until basically bedtime. Now is this something that the rest of us should be worried about? Gaming is not what it was when I was a kid in the 80s, which is sort of a solitary thing where you're trying to almost unlock a puzzle or beat a machine or create a high score. Gaming has mostly been for the past close to 20 years a social competitive activity. So that social component of it is what then led to formalization of leagues and competitions. It kind of started very grassroots when MLG got its start. eSports is the professional competitive stuff that Asepso puts it sits on top of gaming, which itself is a $150 to $170 billion industry and growing. In the second week of March, Verizon released a stat that in the U.S. their network usage specific to gaming had increased 75%. Effectively in the first week of the initial kind of quarantining of or lockdowns and in some of the first states and cities, gaming is up 75% already just in terms of network usage. Reality is most active gamers have hundreds of people across their Twitch, YouTube, various games, platforms like Discord where they communicate with each other. The connectivity that they already have is already there. Professional gaming has its superstars, but is someone who wields a joystick, really an athlete and so will eSports, which is thriving during this crisis, at some point replace physical sports, which are suffering so badly. Later in the show, the search for a vaccine. Around a third of the world's population has been under some form of lockdown. Now, many countries are cautiously reopening, but it does seem clear that we won't return to anything like normal until there's a vaccine. So when will we get one? And how? Our goal is ideally in the summer to start very large clinical trial phase three or people's own studies. And you're talking thousands of people, maybe up to 10,000 people across many different hospitals around the world. And the goal will be to be in a position to potentially assuming everything goes well, to go to the regulators and to actually ask for product approval as early as the end of this year. Right here.