- Zoom has been the winner after the announcement of Epic Games to discontinue Houseparty, its video calling platform
- In April of last year, Houseaparty registered 50 million downloads, entering direct competition with Zoom
- With the arrival of the new normal, what will be the future of Zoom and these applications?
Houseparty will no longer be a competition for Zoom (was it ever?), As Epic Games, owner of the platform, has decided to take it off the market.
After the arrival of the pandemic, the return to offices and schools, it had to be carried out from the virtual, making use, once again, of technology to get ahead and die trying.
They were several months of confinement, where everything was reduced to video calls, video conferences, online classes, remote work, etc., which gave way to a new battle of digital applications in order to position itself as the most ideal work tool for users .
Within the wide range of applications and platforms that saved schools and jobs, Zoom seems to have been the winner, as it was the most requested in that period.
According to data from statista, in April 2020, the month in which we practically began to experience the pandemic, Zoom was the application chosen by Latin American countries to carry out the corresponding work and school activities.
To mention some data, in Brazil, it reached more than a million downloads, with Mexico in second place with just over 740 thousand downloads. They follow with 220 thousand and Argentina with 186 thousand downloads. This only in the month of April of last year.
Now, if we take into account that the confinement lasted almost all of 2020, the Zoom numbers were increased, although other applications also appeared with the same objective: to bring everyday life to the digital device.
This is how Houseparty, an application launched in 2016, emerged as one of the many platforms that competed with Zoom to win the race.
In March of last year, it had downloads from 17 million users and by April of that same year it already had 50 million downloads. In that way it was the application that came closest to Zoom as a potential rival.
However, a year and a half after that boom, Houseparty will leave the market, as announced by Epic Games through a statement that says the following:
“We do not make the decision to discontinue the application lightly. We created Houseparty so that people feel together even when they are physically apart, and we can’t thank you enough for turning to Houseparty for the important moments of your life. “
Given the arrival of the new normal and the trend for hybrid life (between digital and real), it is clear that, little by little, we will depend less on this type of platform.
Now, with the presence of Covid-19, nothing is certain, because, as we have seen, the virus is mutating and developing new strains, some more contagious than others. Under this scenario, nothing can assure us that, from now on, life will begin to resume its rhythm prior to the pandemic.
We saw it with the Delta variant, which is the dominant one in these times of new infections and new deaths. Likewise, there is talk of a new variant, the Lambda, of which, until now, there is no detailed information on its influence.
In that sense, it could be a mistake to discontinue Houseparty, as it seemed to be a good alternative to Zoom, an application that, without a doubt, has been the winner after the announcement of Epic Games.
Now read: