Thanks to some unusual temperatures that I like to think of as some kind of "worldwide heating", we've had a pretty baking hot June and July in the West and elsewhere across the globe. Add in the spectacle of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and there are plenty of excuses to put down the game pad and spend some time out with friends. Or in a dark room watching the football.We decided to take a look at some of our stats across the PlayStation ecosystem to see if there was any correlation between player activity and the weeks of excessive heat and sporting national pride between June and July. It turns out that a whole bunch of us really did switch off our consoles for a while, if only to stop them from melting.June and July 2018 overall saw 9% fewer trophies unlocked compared to April and May. Last year, June and July actually saw a 11% increase in unlocks when compared to the previous two months.When we look at the weeks of the World Cup in particular, we see a noticeable drop compared to last year.

The below graph measures the number of games started each week, between Week 24 and Week 28 of 2018 (June 11th — July 25th)

The lowest activity arrived around the same time for both games started and trophies unlocked: June 25th to July 1st. Temperatures for the month were peaking at the same time in the UK and Europe, but more noticeably the dip coincides with the busiest and arguably most dramatic days of the World Cup: the final round of matches in the group stages.With our fairly broad player base across Europe and the Americas, the most diverse days on the pitch seems to be the days where console play dropped in general. The lowest point of all was the 27th, a day that saw Germany take a shocking early exit from the tournament against Mexico, who slipped through to the knockout stages. With almost 20,000 Brazilian gamers and 13,500 players located in Germany across our sites — plus hundreds of thousands more excited to see how they fare in the Cup — it's probably not surprising that even ardent trophy hunters dragged themselves away from the controller to be a part of the drama.Soaring temperatures and football drama certainly seem to have had an effect on the gaming community. Who knows, it might even have played a small part in Sony losing 300,000 PS Plus subscribers in the quarter leading up to the end of June, though a muted and single-player focused E3 likely didn't help matters. In four years' time the gaming landscape will certainly be different, but it would be worth marketers and strategists remembering that the beautiful game still comes first for a lot of their potential audience.