How streamers are changing the gaming industry

The Beginning

It’s March 19th, 2007. Emmett Shear and Justin Kan are two regular 23-year-old guys, who -unknowingly- would start an Internet revolution. Their idea was to create a website where you could watch Justin’s POV 24 hours a day, all week round, streamed with the help of a Go-Pro-like camera.

This is the origin story of Justin.tv, the website that would later be renamed Twitch, and which after many years (And an acquisition by Amazon in 2014), would become the #1 streaming platform worldwide, offering a space to almost 8 million streamers who just like Justin, wanted to share a bit of themselves with the world.

Nowadays it’s impossible to separate gaming from streaming; Imagine a new game you were really excited about just launched. If this were the 90s, you either had to buy the game blindly, have a friend do so, or wait a week for your favorite gaming magazine to publish a review.

A few years passed, and thanks to platforms like Twitch or YouTube, you can see someone play the game as soon as it comes out to judge if it’s worth a buy, instead of having to rely on the opinion of your friends or some magazine reviewer who may have different tastes than you.

The present

This has led to major changes in the industry because developers now have to consider one extra aspect when creating their games; the spectator’s perspective.

Every developer wants streamers to play their game to get some exposition, and all streamers wish to find the next hidden gem for their audience. This has led to a retroactive cycle where game developers make games catered for streaming, and streamers look for games that fit their dynamic.

Not any game is good for content creation, though; Heavy RPGs and puzzle games are famously not very popular on streaming platforms, even if they are with the general consumer base. The opposite happens with Shooter or MOBA games, taking more than 30% of the global audience on these platforms.

There are many reasons for this, but a big one we can point out is that people aren´t looking for the same when gaming themselves as when watching a streamer.

As this study conducted in 2022 shows, there’s a positive correlation between Twitch consumers looking for tension release and hours watched, so it makes sense that they don’t want to see someone solve complicated puzzles or have to keep track of an RPG’s 100-hour story.

But, what kinds of games can benefit from live-streaming platforms' exposition then? We already talked about Shooters and MOBAs, but to be fair, most top games in these categories were already popular before live-streaming, and we can’t associate their success with these platforms reliably.

Some games that saw actual growth in sales/player base thanks to streaming could be Among Us, which exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, going from 30–50 average players to a peak of 3.8 million, thanks to streamers like Sodapoppin playing it, who is regarded as the first big content creator to play and bring massive popularity to the game.

Another example could be Lethal Company; This is an interesting case, as we can’t track the game's success to a specific creator or moment (The game had 600+ players on its launch day), and still content creation definitely played a part in its growth, with its sole developer Zeekerss having content creators playtest the game before release and getting almost 15.000 peak viewers just a week after launch.

But what about single-player games? Only Up can be a perfect example of this. The game, released in May 2023, was an instant success on Twitch, having 950 average viewers just 3 days after its release, and 280.000 peak viewers almost a month after, selling an estimated 440.000 copies.

Now it’s time to ask the question we all want an answer to: what makes these games so appealing to viewers and streamers? As we saw in the SSRN study, the two main factors driving viewers’ engagement and hours watched were tension release and affective motivations.

With this in mind, we can hypothesize viewers like watching streams where the streamer is playing easy-to-understand-and-follow games, that are good at getting a reaction from the streamer, like a jumpscare or getting angry because a game is hard. These factors allow viewers to relax and not think much when watching, while emotional moments caused by the games keep them engaged.

Among Us for example, checks all these necessities: It’s a social game, easy to understand after a couple of minutes of watching, and it’s really good at getting emotional reactions from streamers, like being set up by one of their friends or trying to gaslight the rest of the match into thinking they aren’t the impostor.

Conclusions

To conclude this article, we can say that while not all types of games are suited for live streaming, those that do can benefit from a symbiotic relationship, with both sides getting something in return for helping the other.

Only time will tell where this takes us. The video game industry is fast-evolving and unpredictable, but the one thing we know for sure is that people will always watch other people play.