Here are some pets to make your day better

When we consider any new type of coverage at GamesIndustry.biz, one of the key questions we ask ourselves is, "How does this serve our readers?"

For the purposes of that question, our readership is a little more specific than just anyone who reads the site. Because we are a trade site, serving our readers means serving an audience of people working within the games industry or looking to get into it.

If we can't provide a convincing argument for how any piece of new content would serve the interests of that audience, then the coverage in question doesn't belong on the site.

Ordinarily that keeps us focused squarely on matters of serious importance to the games industry rather than whatever we think people might personally enjoy reading about.

But as you may have noticed, we are not living in ordinary times. The news has been dominated by COVID-19 these past few months, and it's not the kind of thing you can escape from by simply shutting down the computer and enjoying the world outside. Partly because you're probably not allowed to go outside.

You didn't come here for cold, hard numbers. You came here for soft, fuzzy furballs

Honestly, we're tired of writing about it. We believe many of you are tired of reading about it. Neither of us are going to be able to stop that entirely for a while yet, but there's nothing that says we can't take a break. In fact, we were thinking our readers would probably be well served by a little breather from the news.

So in the interest of serving our readers, we approached a number of contacts throughout the industry recently and asked them to send us pictures of cute pets, figuring we could bundle them all up into an article and just let people scroll through adorable picture after adorable picture of soul-soothing fluffballs, scaly pals, or what have you. It turns out this was not a particularly original thought. A number of the people we approached told us that when their companies shifted to everybody working from home, employees spontaneously created dedicated Slack channels specifically for the sharing of employee pet pictures. Electronic Arts even got back to us with stats:

• 123 - Number of pet photos posted on EA Studio's Slack on a single day -- Friday, March 13 -- as the company settled into working from home
• 279* - Number of pets posted to the channel
• 48% - Percentage of pets posted that were dogs
• 44% - Percentage of pets posted that were cats
• 17% - Percentage of photos with more than one pet in them. Most of those pics were of two (or more) cats
• 55 - Number of pet pics from EA Tiburon employees, about 20% of the channel and the most of any EA studio

*Number slightly lower if you don't include plants, rocks, or sourdough starters as pets.

But that's enough pet metrics for now. You didn't come here for cold, hard numbers. You came here for soft, fuzzy furballs. And we have lots of them. Too many, in fact.

The response to our inquiry for pet pics has been so overwhelming that we're going to spread them out over a number of features, hopefully helping to bolster spirits for as long as it takes for us to get through this. So thank you to everyone who shared their pictures with us, and everyone who helped us compile them here. If you're in the industry and would like to join the effort, you can send your pet pics to us at news@gamesindustry.biz.