The dating app Bumble announced Night In, a new feature that allows you to play on a virtual date. The feature is available to users in the United States and Canada, and the game available at launch is a series of trivial questions that you can answer together. However, Bumble says he plans to offer more games and virtual experiences in the “near future”.
Night In is an expansion of Bumble’s existing video dates feature, which launched in 2019. The feature saw a sharp increase in demand as a result of the pandemic; Bumble says its voice and video calling features were used 70% more after the pandemic started. Hopefully, being able to play a game will work like a good icebreaker and will help mitigate some of the strangest elements of online dating, even if they never correspond to the intimacy of being in the same room as someone else.
Bumble’s Night In can be organized using the icon in a chat message. The virtual date can be scheduled in advance for between 6 pm and midnight on any day of the week. Once scheduled, both participants will receive reminders and notifications via the app before the date.
Bumble’s video chat features existed before the pandemic, but other dating apps like Tinder and Hinge had to rush to update it last year. While the introduction of these resources has undoubtedly been influenced by the pandemic, it appears that they can survive after this current era of social detachment. In a recent poll, Bumble says that almost half of respondents in the United States said they prefer the first meeting to be virtual rather than in person.