What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it's mostly students and single young professionals.
I watch Twitch because I grew up playing lots of video games and now watching is less of a time commitment then playing the games.
Streamers aren't meant to be consumed by watching them every day for hours on end. I mean, I'm sure there are core fans who do that, probably students and single young professionals like you say, but my use case for Twitch is "hey, I have 10-20 minutes free; not even enough time for a full DotA game, but I can see which pro players happen to be online now and watch them play for a bit". This gives me (somewhat surprisingly) lots of the same satisfaction that playing games used to give me; plus it's a lot less stressful (I was mostly into competitive multiplayer games) and without any practice required to get good at the game.
Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
> Meanwhile I wonder how people have time to finish entire seasons of TV shows on netflix, given the modern trend of story-driven shows that assume you've actually seen all the previous episodes instead of pre-internet-era sitcoms that you could jump in and watch any 30-minute episode with little context. Twitch is more of a return to old-school TV in that regard.
Is this really true?
I know I watched random episodes (Malcolm/Seinfeld/Friends/etc..) and enjoyed it. But re-watching them in the proper order is magnitudes better and clearly the way it was supposed to be watched.
I wonder if the same is true for modern TV shows, e.g. the big bang theory - it can be watched and enjoyed by picking a random TV show. Even longer form, say Firefly/Dark Angel/Twin Peaks require you to watch it in order - yet they could be enjoyed on their own as well (you had basically no choice anyway..).
To be fair, instances of lasting change through episodes were rare, usually necessitated by staffing/pay disputes (e.g. Maggie Roswell, who voiced Maude, leaving after wanting money for travel and not getting it, thus Maude being killed off) or death of the voice actor (e.g. Marcia Wallace, who played Edna Krabappel, among others).
And I do actually remember the amazement in the community when she stayed dead, rather than springing back to life as though it had never happened in the next episode.
It depends if the creators of the show are targeting syndication. Star Trek is a good example of this - TOS, TNG, Voyager episodes are generally self contained and single episode reruns are viable. DS9 on the other hand had more long-running arcs requiring more context, making the syndication rights less lucrative. Rarely did reruns of DS9 air after the series ended.
No, not really. First off, returning to the status quo is a sitcom thing, not a "pre-Internet" thing, but even then, characters change, leave and are introduced from time to time. Also, you can jump into a "modern" show and figure out any context you need to know pretty easily. I got into Barry and Curb in the middle of their seasons this year, and I still laughed through them...
A lot of people are watching these streams AS THEY GAME. I can devote 75% of my attention to one monitor as a play "League of Legends", and listen to some helpful coaching from a Twitch Stream with 25% of my attention in the other monitor.
At times when my game is loading, or my character is dead and I'm waiting to respawn I can even devote 100% of my attention to the stream, and engage in chat.
I also can enjoy a stream when I'm taking public transportation or an Uber somewhere. Situations where I would game if I could, but I can't, so watching pros is the next best thing.
I mean maybe, but it's just as the person you replied to said:
Lot of us grew up playing videogames with all of our free time. We are adults now. People in our age bracket who watch Twitch video game streams often probably do so to replace some of that time we wish we could be gaming.
I can't speak on younger generation's consumption of Twitch and Youtube but I imagine for them it's just as normal as watching TV, playing video games, watching videos on the internet (in the early days), or to liken it to something people my generation and older did: going outside and playing.
That's how I watch. When I'm playing an MMO or similar I have Twitch (or Netflix, or Youtube videos) playing on my second monitor. It's no different than having tv or radio on in background while you cook dinner or similar.
My hobby is making stuff, electronics, wood working stuff like that. Like gaming it's time consuming and I often don't have the time or energy. So I just watch other people doing it on YouTube a lot more than I do it myself. It's very rare for me to watch a live stream actually live though, more often than not I throw it in my "watch later" after the broadcast.
I think this is a good explanation, however don't you find that you have to be a player of the game in order to enjoy watching it? Not being a MOBA player, I can never understand what is going on when watching games like DotA.
You need to understand it certainly, in the same way you need to understand the rules of Football to really enjoy watching a game. but I haven't played SC or SC2 in years and I still enjoy watching the streams, in the same way that I've never played a real game of hockey but still like watching the NHL.
Depends on the game. I have watched Dota 2 games and have absolutely no idea what anyone is doing or why. I tried playing HOTS and even the tutorial couldn't explain to me what a MOBA is.
I think a lot of Twitch is not competitive games like Dota or Overwatch and are really casual games that anyone can understand. I never played Portal 2 cooperative but can easily understand what's going on if someone is streaming it. I think people that don't play the game but watch are watching games in that genre.
There are also games in the middle, like Fortnite, that are pretty easy to follow. "What do you do in this game?" "Kill anything that moves and run to the circle." Once you understand that you can probably figure out what the streamer is doing and why.
I tried Rocket League... I didn't find it that much fun and the learning curve was a bit too steep. I certainly knew what to do in the game, but I could never get out of my elementary-school soccer habits where I just chased the ball around like an idiot, never in a position to make a play. If I was in a good position, I didn't know what the controls did. As a result, not much fun.
Overwatch I got sucked into immediately. I knew the basic idea; kill the red team... and the rest of the details I picked up as I played. The matchmaking did a very good job of keeping the games winnable but not boring. The variety of heroes has something for everyone; from those that have been playing FPSes since they were 5 (Soldier, McCree, Widowmaker), those that picked up Overwatch as their first competitive FPS at 30 (Winston, Reinhardt, Moira, Mercy...), or those that want something completely different (Doomfist, Sombra, Symmetra). I have made many friends in that game, even met my (ex-) girlfriend via "stay as team" after a good match.
The biggest problem Overwatch has is that they made it appealing to the hard-core gamers as well, so you have to wade through all the people in the community that complain about "no aim, no brain" because they happened to play Aim Hero 13 hours a day and believe that's the only skill in a first-person perspective game that involves killing people. And the balance of the game is such that right now, they're kind of right... people with average aim in other games can absolutely destroy with Hanzo given the large hitbox of his one-shot-kill arrows. You don't need positioning, you don't need teamwork; just get those arrows in the immediate vicinity of the enemy's heads and you win, no matter what your team is doing. They'll probably tone him down a bit in the near future, though.
Rocket League has a pretty serious inflection point on the learning curve where the game suddenly becomes much more fun. Basically once you can control the ball enough where your optimal strategy isn't "punt the ball as far as you can", the game gets much more interesting.
I clocked about 200 hours over 3 years before hitting that point, and since then I've done another 200 over 6 months.
Regardless, I think it's one of the few e-sports that's fun to watch regardless of how skilled you are yourself.
Yeah, I felt completely useless in the beginning. It wasn't fun at all but then it suddenly clicked and I started improving. Now I feel like one with the car and can pull of stuff I would only dream of (air dribbles, ceiling shots etc).
Also, RL has become my favorite esport by far. The problem is that unless you've tried the game you don't realize how crazily good the pro players are. Things that wows me don't impress my non-RL friends at all.
Rocket league was meh for me, but then I tried Oculus’s Echo VR zero-gravity soccer - and it’s unbelievably good. Having real physical competitive sport in your room anytime, instantly - it’s like a dream came true.
Not quite watchable on streams and videos currently because first person view on 2d screen is erratic and horribly flat - but I hope games like this is the future.
Just like regular sports, you need to understand the basic rules, but that doesn't mean you need to know all of them. Most people don't know the full rulebook of sports that they watch.
And commentators can make it even more accessible; their expertise is there to help provide context and guidance.
As someone who watches a lot of Dota (at an esports bar with strangers who may or may not know dota) and plays very little, you’re half right.
In football You don’t need to know, exactly, which way the plays are going to go and why, but you do need to know the rough constraints of the game and what is physically possible to perform.
Some of the things that happen in dota are utterly impossible to follow unless you have, at the very least, a knowledge of the (on average 3) active abilities of the ~110 heroes.
Yeah, I think this is the major difference. Being from Europe I don't really know anything about American football or baseball beyond the basics, but watching a game it's pretty transparent whenever someone does something good. I don't need to know batting averages, the difficulty of plays, or why a play was exceptional to know when a player or team scored points.
Games like MOBAs are opaque by comparison. I can see roughly what's going on but I couldn't tell you if a team is winning or losing to save my life. In football if the guy holding the ball is out in front of the defending team and running to the end zone I can guess he's going to score a TD, but a team can look like they're getting whooped in DotA but really they're tricking the opponents and someone is making a sneaky play in a different corner of the map or someone has an ability or gear that means the situation is the reverse of what it appears, etc.
All of that is really only apparent to someone very familiar with the game.
In addition to what others have said (you need to understand the game, not be an actual player of it), many channels cultivate a community of the same regular viewers. While gaming is technically the thing that brings them all together, the streamers' humor, community in-jokes, and a sense of shared interest are what make different channels unique. As a non-gamer, that's why I watch a few of them regularly.
Watching streams is "about" gaming in the same sense that tailgating is "about" football.
Not necessarily, several of my co-workers are big into Overwatch so when the Overwatch League started up in January I started watching matches with them. After a few weeks of asking questions as we went, I felt like I had a pretty handle on it and could start to contribute to the discussion.
You are absolutely correct though. Those first few weeks I had no idea what was happening aside from the occasional head-shot.
The popular FPS games like Overwatch, CS:GO, or Fortnite are easy to understand for someone who've never played them. Dota/LoL/Starcraft are completely different though -- you needs lots of hours of experience to even have any clue as to what's going on. Try watching it, and you'll see what I mean.
This is true of DotA and LoL, but not really Starcraft. Starcraft is fairly easy to pick up and almost all the relevant information to understand who is ahead, who is behind, and how the game is going is easily visible on the screen.
Games like DotA and LoL have too many mechanics built into them that are just debt from their origins as a Warcraft 3 mod. They're not really intuitive or sensical to the uninitiated.
Moreover, in Starcraft if lots of different things are happening at once, it's as technically challenging for the players to keep track of as it is for the viewers. With MOBAs the action is scattered across 3 to 6 areas of the map at the same time, so it's way more complicated to keep track of as a spectator.
The Blizzard MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, was kind of designed from the ground up to be a lot more watchable. They got rid of the item stuff and moved the complexity from being focused on the character builds to more strategic stuff that's visible on the map. But it doesn't seem to have taken off that much.
For some people who used to play RTS and MOBA games years ago, they can still understand what's happening in a complex team game, even if they don't actively play the game.
As a Twitch consumer (married 'professional' in early 30's). I am a huge video game nerd at heart, so I watch streamers that run games that I am interested in however don't have time to play/master. Often it doesn't involve me sitting down for hours at night (although I am sure there's a huge demographic that does that as well). I usually watch when I am laying in bed before I go to sleep. Same time my wife is usually watching some separate but equally mind numbing content to decompress from a long day.
Just another form of entertainment, like tv, but there's nothing I enjoy watching on tv. To each their own.
This. I also enjoy video games and often read up on trends and news... unfortunately I have little to no time to really meaningfully play them. I enjoy watching people who have gotten really masterful play the games I have read about. Not unlike sports.
I also watch things like the Games Done Quick marathons. Those are mostly people who have dedicated themselves to a few games and are mostly interested in completing them in insanely short periods of time. People often spend years dedicating time to shaving off minutes... I would never do that... but I am glad someone does.
Yea I love games and used to play a lot, but they have become a huge time commitment. It’s usually one or more of:
1. Games that simply require grinding to unlock game progression (XP, time-based gates, etc.)
2. Games with numerous hour-long quests that need to be done serially in order to progress
3. Games that disproportionately reward outlier-level skill, requiring a huge practice time commitment (multiplayer shooters)
4. Games that reward deep knowledge of rules and formulas, requiring extensive study and sometimes Excel modeling (Eve Online comes to mind, but also the Civilization series and some sandbox games)
These days if you want something fun you can play for 15-30 minutes and still get good at on that schedule, you’re limited to the bland “Casual Gaming” genre.
I would say not really. For one thing, the early days of gaming held onto many elements from arcades where games were meant to be consumed in somewhat bite-sized chunks (Atari, NES, etc).
A big factor for multiplayer games is the somewhat modern obsession with matchmaking and character intro/pick screens. When I was a kid, I could hop into a game immediately for a 15-20 minute deathmatch session of Quake 1/2/3 in any semi-populated server then leave whenever it was time to do homework, etc.
Last I tried Quake Champions, the newest installment in the series, you spend roughly 1-5 minutes in a matchmaking queue then another 2-3 minutes (or more, it was pretty bad sometimes) in some intro/loading screens, then another minute or two in a pre-match warm-up. So even in the same genre's case you're already potentially 8+ minutes sunk into your 15-20 minute 'quick game' period.
To make matters worse (again because of matchmaking) you are penalized if you have to leave before the completion of a match or if you go idle. Usually this penalty is applied as a low-priority queue the next time you try to matchmake which just compounds the problem from above.
Don’t forget the 2-3 minutes it seems to take to even load the game. QC would be so much better if you could just load it (quickly) hop onto an already-playing game, and skip all the intros and statistics. How did a franchise like Quake backslide so badly?
I think the developer/publisher are just responding to market pressures.
Quake Live (at least for its first few years) was relatively pure and old-school, including in the ways mentioned in this thread, but it was only moderately popular and didn't seem to do well financially. The most (financially) successful modern games tend to focus a lot on extrinsic motivations to play -- including character progression, unlockables, gambling crates etc., but also things that give extra context to individual matches, like statistics and ranking points -- rather than just the core gameplay. People also have less tolerance for being the newbie who loses 100-0, and expect to be matched against players around their level.
Not all of these things are relevant to your question, but some of them help to explain the trend toward lobbies, matchmaking queues, and other obstacles to just clicking on a server list and jumping into a game.
Same boat. I find a chill streamer that doesn't talk much and plays a game I like. I set the TV to 30 minute timer and watch for ~10 minutes before falling asleep. This is similar to people that fall asleep to shows they like -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurama_Sleepers/
White noise is better than nothing, but my brain won't stop generating content (thoughts) with white noise. When the TV is generating the content, my brain focuses on that, and it's mindless enough to fall asleep to. I think it has something to do with being a mentally active person forced into a passive role, like shifting the brain into low gear.
Check out the book, "Turning the Mind into an Ally" by Sakyong Mipham. I used the techniques in that book to silence those random, erratic thoughts. I fall asleep within a minute of hitting the pillow now.
When my SO is out of town, my brain generates all sorts of horrible possibilities of things that could happen to my while laying in bed, from simple home invasions to black holes suddenly appearing and consuming my right arm. Watching Futurama (I had no idea there was a whole community around it) distracts me from those invasive thoughts.
I get pareidolia from white noise. Not a lot, but enough that the 'sounds' are more distracting than mundane background sounds like TV or music that I can tune out easily.
No but I've spent a good amount of time doing vaguely sound-engineering work where I listen carefully to audio samples. I may have overtrained some pattern-recognition wetware along the way.
Even 'naturally' generated white noise (e.g. Marpac Sound Machine)? I have similar problems listening to electronically generated white noise but no problems with the Marpac.
Possibly not lab-grade white noise, just broadband audio noise in general: fans, moving water, RF static, voice codec comfort noise turned up too loud, that sort of thing.
If you grew up in a big family and got used to there always being voices and activity in the house, it can be kind of comforting just to have quiet, familiar voices as background noise.
I've been trying to go to sleep earlier for a little over a week now (I used to sleep at about 3AM-5AMish and now I'm sleeping at about 9:30PM-10:3PM0ish now). My sleep plan is turn off all the lights, open up my laptop about 30 minutes before I try and sleep and watch an episode or two of futurama on 1.23x speed. I've been getting to sleep every night since on my target time despite being on an Adderall prescription. Futurama really helps for some reason. I'm trying to build it up to the point where I don't need to watch any show to get to sleep early, but I'm not quite at that point yet.
For me it's dubbed anime, it probably takes me 1-2 weeks to make it through an entire episode.
While I work I need some noise, something, nearly anything. The complete lack of silence bothers me. I usually listen to OCRemix at work (via rainwave.cc) or 90's/00's music from when I was younger (nostalgia).
At home I will put on something like Friends (Netflix), Giant Bomb videos (giantbomb.com), or classic game play throughs (NES, SNES, Genesis) on YouTube (or Giant Bomb). For example, LaserTime did Aladdin SNES vs Aladdin Genesis side by side video and they played through NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpson's games on NES/SNES. Giant Bomb has a series called Vinnyvania where Vinny (one of the Giant Bomb employees) plays through all the Castlevania games and another where they play through all the fighting games and rank them. I'm not into the new games.
Just a sidenote for anyone else who might be streaming rainwave from a limited connection: it uses about 60 megabytes an hour and sounds pretty heavily compressed (only a problem on some tracks)
Another thing about the TV analogy; when TV was only broadcast, many people (well, at least I...) would end up not watching an entire series. You turn on the TV and find out it's episode 3 airing tonight. What do you do? Just watch it and figure out what's going on via context, or try to hunt down someone who has a VCR and already taped episodes 1 and 2?
Twitch in some ways is more like those old days. I follow several streamers fairly closely. And by "fairly closely" I mean "they stream several hours a day and I probably watch 20 minutes of it, amortized over time".
We had VCRs with timed record from the early 80s onward and had a _large_ collection of recorded VHS.
We got into the habit of recording a few minutes before and after the show was supposed to air, as things frequently did not run on schedule. Especially recording things on the major TV networks and recording Doctor Who off NJN who would keep the fundraiser drives going as long as they could before starting an episode.
The only problem with this was sometimes my brother had a habit of taping public access porn over whatever was in the VCR...but that wasn't exactly a problem either. :)
Good point with broadcast TV. For shows I enjoy on Netflix, I'll usually miss the latest season on live broadcast if I forget to set the DVR to catch the series. If I wait until episode 3, I've already missed 1 & 2. So I can hope for enough re-runs to catch them all or wait longer for the series to migrate to Netflix where I can watch on my own schedule.
I also find entertainment in watching game streamers, but I catch them on Youtube at my own schedule as well. I've never attempted to subscribe to Twitch and watch live.
Yeah same. I've found there are a handful of games that are fun to watch rather than play. League of Legends and MOBA games for instance are super freaking boring for me to play because I suck at killing creeps (too tedious for me) but watching pros play is pretty satisfying because the higher level games are faster paced.
Also agree with the TV thing -- lots of things I don't enjoy watching or maybe if its an episode, I don't have an entire hour to watch so rather not start one if I'm not gonna finish it.
Consumer of the content as well. I play some of the games I watched stream. For me it includes insight into how things work and how to play better. Some streamers have good connections to developers and also provide a platform by which they and their audience can discuss a game, mechanics, and such, live, which is much more enjoyable than just posting to a forum.
Finally the more successful streamers are very enjoyable to watch. They engage with their audiences and treat them with respect. Compared to some of the smaller or no audience streamers who don't communicate or are just rude to their audience when they have one.
It is entertainment, it also is background noise for me when I am working.
I work for Twitch but I'll put it in old man terms: I have a subscription to MLB.tv. I watch EVERY SINGLE game of my team each year, that's 162*3 = 486 hours a year. That's 27% of a 1800 hour work year. If you go in season, that's 54%. It's on all day every day that I'm at my work desk. I watch Twitch the rest of the year.
Do I watch it intently? No. Do I know the score and what's going on? Generally. Do I feel I followed the season, YES. Though I have noticed that since I DVR (I watched the world series DURING spring training) a lot I don't keep up with the day to day discussions I actually know less about the team than my brother who watches few games but reads bleacher report constantly.
Why do I do it? Well for 8 years I worked in a heavily paired environment, then went to a job with private offices and felt under stimulated. Started watching baseball / twitch just so it felt like others were in the room. Also I have ADD so these things likely help keep me at neutral input levels.
I'm sure you have some garbage ass tv you just toss on as well. Home remodel shows, golf, blatheringly repetitive cable news. These things are mildly connected to your interest and are either there to be in the background or they're there to let you just zone out and decompress.
When working with amazon I often have to have this conversation with people... it usually goes like this:
55 year old business lead of some VP vertical: It's really wierd to me that people watch hours of other people play video games. It's got to be incredibly boring.
Me: I notice you have a "Masters" hat on. Do you watch that?
55: Yes.
Me: You realize that like 99% of people think golf puts them to sleep.
I imagine many here would kill for some peace and quiet at work. The idea that I'd want to add noise and conversation into it is horrifying to me personally.
Even at home, I would never want to have some random thing blaring in the background. I only watch things that are worth my full attention.
With my ADD I find I concentrate more when some amount of background noise. Some things distract me, others like baseball not really, or they distract JUST enough. One of my old coworkers would just put the same song on repeat all day long.
It is really regrettable that humans have this incredibly illogical, subconscious algorithm for making otherwise logical decisions.
Most of the money and capital in this world are held by the older generations rather than the younger generations. The younger generations have to then spend their time "pitching" the older generations on ideas that, in a vacuum, are logical but not evident to the older generations.
As a result, anyone in the younger generations who has a personal relationship with the older generations (such as yourself) will become disproportionately wealthy if their pitch is accepted, compared to say the 27 year old single mother + person of color.
As a person of color, the last time I checked, there are also old people of color. It's not like we just sprung up fully formed 10 years ago or something, okay?
There's no need to accuse me (an ally) of allegedly forgeting your existence when I was merely trying to give an example of someone who is statistically extremely underprivileged.
The entire idea of 'allyship' is racist, tbh. There are >3 billion non-white people. The idea that you can somehow promote all their interests is ridiculous. The only way you can believe that is if you actually think we are all the same. Last time I checked, we don't all share one group mind.
Twitch has offered VODs ("videos on demand") for streams for a number of years now, and people who can't see all the streams generally have at least a week to catch up on any content they particularly wanted to see. Skimming works particularly well if you just want the high points.
Where Twitch's live model works really well is in having a community of people all watching together. Streamers often engage with their audiences in some way, and Twitch's recent move to offer lower-latency streams is a reflection of that. There's a recent craze for a marble racing game called "Marbles on Stream", which a streamer integrates with their Twitch chat so that viewers can type `!play` to enter a marble into the race. (It's a Skinner box if I've ever seen one, but I like Jelle's MarbleLympics on YouTube, so I'm not one to talk.) You couldn't do that with recorded content.
As someone that views Twitch every day I can say I never watch the entirety of a stream. You drop in and view when you have time. It is less akin to watching a TV show and more like going to your friends house and hanging out to watch some of the game.
Thanks! That really helps me to understand Twitch.
For a while I had gamer friends who lived just down the street. It was much more enjoyable to hang out and watch them play than it would have been for me to play their games. I just didn't have the time to invest, so my main experience of AAA games was 20 minutes of flailing at level 1 while asking which buttons did what. It was way more fun to watch them kick ass and zoom through the game.
Yeah this is close to what I do as well. I have a few people that i've found on twitch and like to hop on for a little while to say what up. The only time i seriously watched twitch for hours was when hob was doing the dark souls trilogy no hit run. I was watching for hours lol my wife really grew to hate that haha.
I'm not a twitch streamer/viewer, but I believe a lot of folks are in it for the community aspect. Following your favourite streamers and being a participant in the group chat - especially if your streamer chats with the group - is a way for folks to feel like they're hanging with friends.
In contrast, watching TV by yourself can be quite lonely.
There are a lot of other differences between TV and twitch; I'm not sure how much worth there is in comparing them. They seem (to me) to mostly be different categories of products that happen to both include a video component.
I moderate a Twitch channel that has about 800 viewers for any given stream. (1100 paid subscribers or thereabout.) I don't do it every day, but I do find the streamer entertaining and I play the game he streams, so it's a somewhat educational (you can apply what you watch to your own gameplay) way to zone out and not do any thinking. Sometimes you feel like watching, sometimes you feel like playing. Since I started watching Twitch streams, I honestly haven't watched normal TV and couldn't name any current TV programs or movies; Twitch has taken that over. (Why watch instead of play? Rank is at stake and if I'm tired and not going to be making good decisions quickly, I'm just going to throw the game and lose my precious precious SR.)
You are right that the audience skews very young. Most of the viewers are half my age, and act like it... but we do do a pretty good job keeping the discussion intelligent. Most people write off Twitch chat, but if actively curated it can be educational, interesting, and inviting to more than just the "I'm 15 and my parents won't let me watch TV so I'm watching this on my phone" demographic. Most channels stopped trying; we try and we're doing okay.
Some games are easier to watch than others. Overwatch is fine, it's a very action-packed game and there are no boring moments. I play Hearthstone but honestly don't watch any streams because it's just sitting there for 70 seconds waiting for the streamer (or their opponent) to make a decision. I do watch edited videos on YouTube to see how decks I don't play work, however.
The downtime can really be a killer, though. I was watching a popular Hearthstone streamer play over the weekend (I was bored) and she spent most of the time playing that game where you draw something and the AI guesses it while waiting for her opponent to take their turn. Not worth my time.
As a once-moderator for a smaller stream, I can definitely confirm that there is gold in them Twitch chat hills. Community shaping is important and often overlooked, and it really does help to have a moderation team that cares! It helps that my streamer is more of a variety streamer than someone who sticks to a single game or two, so he has a large core of viewers who are there for him and his friends, not just for the game at hand.
Twitch has become my default entertainment at home.
What I really enjoy about Twitch is that I can have it on in the background while doing other stuff (coding most of the time).
I am a huge video game fan, but as I aged, unfortunately, I found it difficult to dedicate time to video games (and there by taking time away from my coding). Twitch allows me to not only get the story of video games, but enjoy the game along with an entertaining streamer and chat (though I rarely ever pay attention to chat).
I think there are a few components as someone who was like "how do people watch others play video games" to now a casual gamer/twitch watcher:
1. Some days I wanna play, but I'm not actually on top form, going to twitch and decompressing by watching someone else play, live, has this strange humanness to it. In the most absurd of ways, you build a "friendship" with the streamer, even if only as a voyeur. I hate that reality, but I found myself liking the characters and tuning in to specific streams.
2. A lot of great plays/rounds/etc will get "clipped" and make rounds on various social media so I don't have to keep up 24/7.
3. Big "esports" events are the same things as normal sporting events, people will record/watch live and make time for the things that are important to them. It surprised me too, but being on the "other side" now, it's fun.
Twitch replaces TV and competes with YouTube and Netflix time for me. I watch it in a lossy manner, where it's usually on while I work from home. The only time I'm watching Twitch in a lossless manner is when a Starcraft tournament is on, and in that case it feels exactly like watching back to back hockey games: about 5-6 hours of competition on a weekend.
Same here, but with Age of Empires II! I still tune in to the biggest SC2 events even though I don't really know what's going on, RTS is just such a sick spectator "sport".
The biggest reason in my opinion is that its an interactive and unfiltered experience.
Seeing someone on the other side of the world react to a comment you write gives you a huge sense of connection. More than a passive TV show can offer.
>Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it's mostly students and single young professionals.
Streaming is great "background noise" for when you're bored and sitting around the house. It fills the same niche that I think sports does for sports people. It's live entertainment with no fixed outcome.
This was pre-Twitch, but I used to work at a company where the tech team after hours would play Age of Empires for fun. We kind of got into it, we would read strategy guides, blog comments over whether it was best to be Assyrians or Babylonians or Choson etc. Some people (not us) would really get into it and spend hours measuring things like how long it took for a catapult to get from one side of the map to the other, measuring each second and pixel carefully.
I'm sure if Twitch were around and some of the best players broadcast their games with live commentary we would have watched them for pointers. I used to play Quake and remember watching a pre-Twitch video of one of the best Quake players, "Thresh", and observing how one of the best (perhaps the best) Quake players played the game.
In terms of time, it's like people taking golf lessons to get a better swing and get their par down, or people reading chess endgame books to learn how to properly do a bishop and knight checkmate, or what have you. I guess you're right about students and single young professionals, as that is when I had the time to spend on improving my skill at various games.
I don't play as much video games as much anymore but I had 5000 loyal followers that would take my word as the gospel.
I had some offers on a dozen gaming networks, the biggest one was TGN. I would categorize twitch followers based on age demographic, since this is most of the behavioral trends I noticed
Young millenials have nothing to better to do sometimes and really enjoy having that "virtual friend" / "virtual older sibling" mentality when it comes to video games. It fills a void they have and its easily accessible, all they need is their phone and internet. No need to schedule things with your buddies who might not be in the mood to game. Example, pewdiepie's viewers are on the younger demographic end
General agnostic age categories - I would divide into four areas regardless of age.
- One (like me) who still likes gaming and wants to keep up with some games mostly out of curiosity / bc I don't have time, so I watch gameplay videos mostly on youtube. I skip ahead sometimes and only watch videos here and there, sometimes at 2x speed.
- Two, people who have nothing better to do and enjoy watching streamers as a form of entertainment. Sometimes I would fit in this category as well, I watch a few fortnite players (nickeh30) who just have a great personality and are able to pull complex movements that only maybe 0.1% of players could do.
- Third, people looking to get better at the game by watching streamers. I sometimes fit in above category
- Fourth, we also have the esports area. This is your diehard sports-level fandom and I used to be a huge fan of DoTA partially because I played it for 10+ years and played with some of the top players competing today. It was nostalgia for me if anything, much like people who loved soccer growing up watched the world cup
So there you go, that's how I categorize gamers on twitch. You also have kappa trolls among other things and also softcore porn tailored towards parental controlled networks for kids nearing puberty but that's a totally different story. Then you also have programming streams, we get a largely mostly older / smarter tech audience for that.
Twitch does have an API as well if you want to do data analytics on it
I play Heroes of the Storm, so I sometimes open their esports tournament stream and keep it playing on the side. If a match looks interesting I'll pay attention or note the teams that are playing so I can revisit the VOD later.
For big StarCraft tournaments I sometimes tune in to major events as well. You can always watch the VODs later, but it's fun to chat with people during the games, or posting your thoughts while things are ongoing on the appropriate subreddit.
So it's similar to keeping ESPN running on your TV, or tuning in to the Superbowl or World Cup finals.
People sometimes even go out and meet up at venues to watch these tournaments. For example, in the bay area there are a few gaming lounges / bars that show major game tournaments. That can be a good chance to socialize with people who share a common interest with you.
You can engage much more directly with smaller streamers. I used to seek out streamers of a certain strategy game with a dozen or so viewers and offer play suggestions. Usually little enough is going on (chat wise) that you can talk to the person about the game and specific decisions.
It can also be fun to just chat with like-minded strangers while a game is going on in the background.
I feel there's a few things worth mentioning that either haven't been mentioned or I have a different take on.
For me, Twitch is background a lot of time. I have 3 monitors, so I often have youtube or twitch up on one while I work on something, and it has a chat, so you can interact with other people watching it and their conversation if the whole thing isn't just a giant meme-blast-fuckathon like it is on so many popular streams. In this era of marathon-oriented Netflix shows, Youtube and Twitch are surprisingly reminiscent of old-school TV in how little attention they demand.
It makes sense if the player is REALLY good at the game, ie. in the top 0.1% globally or similar. It serves as a learning experience. You will learn much faster by watching a good player compared to grinding the game and slowly discovering the same mechanics yourself.
You probably wouldn't watch some random kids stream of them playing football in their backyard.
Now imagine Messi himself doing exactly that and also commenting it live, explaining all his tricks and his reasoning for every move he makes on the field. I bet you would be much more interested.
As someone once part of the communities which represent 'hard core' twitch users, a large demographic is age 16-28 males with one or zero core responsibilities - commonly college or a blue collar job. They go to class or work, then get home and spend 6+ hours gaming and on twitch.
Think of it this way, if you only have that one obligation and no social life, what else are you going to do? No, watching twitch streamers or hanging out in ephemeral discord channels is not a true substitute for a "real" social life.
This is very frustrating for me. I like to watch skilled players who explain their startegy to improve my own game play, but streams are a slog to watch live. Some streamers archive their streams, but big chunks of their recordings are muted because they play copyrighted music.
I know I'm in a tiny minority of people that watch streamers as a learning tool and not as a source of entertainment. No reason to cater to people like me.
What you are saying is that Fair Use cannot be utilized, because the hosting company is somehow violating copyright.
That is the same nonsensical logic that is used against MegaUpload and bittorrent; the same nonsensical logic that Youtube's Content Protection system is based on; the same nonsensical logic that drives DRM.
The world is not better when copyright holders are able to compel a third party to win their disputes. Unfortunately, that is the world we live in.
Sometimes I see people playing an old indie game I love and watch it for like 20~30 min. I don't want to invest in playing it again; I've already played it several times before..so with twitch I can watch someone play for a few min to burn some time.
I worked with one guy who'd keep StarCraft competitions playing in the background on his third monitor while he coded all day.
Only the most dedicated fans engage in that sort of thing.
I think most people use it when they need something low-investment to watch for a bit, pull up a popular stream for whatever game you're interested in and you have something that you can easily step in or out of, switch to a different stream if one gets boring, etc.
Same way some people use reality shows and similar such things.
> When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model.
Just b/c it's moving that way doesn't mean that behavior is going to go away. People watch CNN/FOX for hours straight (usually not attentively watching it mind you). This is no different.
I know a guy who made millions by getting in early on Crypto. I had to room with him for a month, and it wasn't until then that I realized he watched Twitch all day. I mean, literally all day. 95% of the time I saw him that month, he was either watching a stream or playing Fortnite.
I'm in my late 30s, and my girlfriend and I are currently streaming more Twitch than Netflix. There's a use case where sometimes you want something on in the background while you're doing other things. Usually we'd stream Netflix shows we've watched already, but after doing that the 10th time for a show, it gets stale.
When you find a streamer you like, it can be very relaxing. It's also introduced us to games we wouldn't play otherwise. My girlfriend hates anything scary, but we found a great stream of Last Of Us that made it really fun. I've also discovered new games to play through it.
So much depends on the streamer, though. If you don't get it, you probably haven't found the right one for you.
I watched a lot of Twitch while I was playing video games myself. The slower paced games (Cities Skylines, Factorio, Minecraft, Civ 5, etc.) have occasionally monotonous periods where having something in the background is nice filler.
There're games I enjoy but not very good at and streamers that play these games that I find entertaining to watch.
I usually keep Twitch playing while I do some housekeeping churns or cook. If there's a playthrough I particularly enjoy, I play VOD over a course of a few days for about 30 minutes at a time (usually one or two sessions a day). Otherwise I either watch live if one of my channels is online or pick a VOD from one of them.
Basically I treat Twitch channel as a YouTube channel or a podcast with an added bonus that they often broadcast live, too, and I can interact with the channel host.
For competitive games, watching a rank 1 player do their thing will save you much more time when climbing rating than trying to figure it out alone. Sure there are guides and videos, but that really doesnt do the same justice.
Even just watching how a high performing esports team communicates in real time is pretty interesting.
It's down right impressive at how much some people can process in real time.
Also, i find it super entertaining to watch very skilled people do somthing that they enjoy. I might watch 1 hour of tv a week, but probably 2-3 hours of twitch in small intervals (30 mins here and there)
I have it on my other monitor while I develop. I don't divert full attention to it, I'm just listening then periodically tune in when I'm in thought or need a small mental break.
I recently started using Twitch for poker streaming channels, but I also like to watch the video game play, since I don't have to go through any learning/skill curve to play any game myself - I can sit and watch play, and be entertained (team battles) or depressed (Assassin's Creed) with what players are doing with their time.
I'm definitely out of the target demographic for Twitch, but I consider it an additional entertainment channel when I'm bored of content in traditional media such as Youtube TV and Netflix.
The thing is you don't have to sit down and watch a streamer for hours at a time. There's a variety of content that you can just switch over to someone else you follow that's streaming, or just watch the past broadcasts of streams you missed. It's kind of like watching youtube videos, or even traditional couch-surfing.
I spend an hour or so every night just browsing through streams to look for interesting content, swapping between games and IRLs. It's a good shift away from production TV content.
>What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content.
My impression is that most people are just having it on in the background while they do other stuff. If this sort of thing was around back when I was in college I can definitely imagine myself streaming something on Twitch while I studied.
The overall vibe seems to be analogous to having someone keeping you company while you work. Not that different from talk radio shows, only more interactive.
I mostly watch Twitch during a big title release, just to see if I am interested or not. I also like watching big events like Overwatch League and other competitions. To me it is relaxing to watch people that are very good at the game play because I also learn from them and do that myself in game.
some just don't have the money to buy the game they want so they go into Twitch to watch that very game and get their fix until they can purchase that game.
I don't mean to be rude but you are way off course about who/why people watch Twitch streams. Sure some of the Twitch viewerbase fits your description but plenty of people will tune in for a short period of time. ESPECIALLY people who don't have a lot of time because it can satisfy people's video game urges without actual investing tons of time in playing.
I treat a few recurring streams as podcasts where I just listen to the audio after it's already aired. That's pretty much it, I don't really watch any content and I don't show up to streams while they're live.
Twitch's VOD player is not particularly good, I might even say pretty bad, but you can absolutely watch on-demand.
Twitch is more like live-sports, at least the streams I watch, which are Soulsborne (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, etc) speedruns. I'm self-employed, so it makes watching easier, but definitely not every night. Some of these streamers will play the same game for 8+ hours a day... for years. It's insane.
I love having it on when I'm just hanging out at night. I like the background noise, almost kind of like radio I can pay attention to if I feel like it.
There are people who will sit down and watch full broadcasts and in that case it can be a lot of time.
A lot of streamers are just always on which I'm sure makes it easier.
I'm a business owner, dad, amatuer athlete, and watch a LOT of Twitch.
It plays in the background when I'm grinding on work stuff late at night, or when I want to do SOMETHING that isn't watching TV. Much less commitment and effort than the games themselves, and feels about the same.
Most streamers have a fixed schedule so it's not that difficult to catch them online. I'm not sure why you think it's for students and single young professionals or that you need to spend hours of time online, you can watch whenever and for however long you want.
Dual monitor setup, minimised tab being effectively audio only, its also an equiv. to an online howto, cheat, or game mag. Don't underestimate how widely popular certain games such as LoL, SC2, PUBG, and many others are. I also suspect numbers are inflated.
Many folks are obviously not that busy. Simple TV consumption for example is still a few hours a day … And I am not included in that average, so a lot of folks spend a substantial time of their day with passive screen use.
I've witnessed large groups of programmers in open offices who all have twitch running on their iphones and are listening in with headphones. They literally watch/listen to twitch all day every day at work.
A guide to playing many popular games on twitch, written even a few months back, is outdated much faster than even JavaScript framework best practices. As a consequence of this, content which is new has natural advantages over content which is not new. Content even a week old can be so out-dated as to be worthless, not just in theory but frequently in practice. In fact, the strength of the advice and the likelihood that the advice is outdated within a week are actually correlated, because game developers do balance patches.
From these observations, if you assume that people are watching gaming content to learn, you should be able to reduce confusion at the popularity of live content on twitch and start to get an understanding of why Twitch does not represent a step backwards.
The fruits of the paradox of choice. Many despised (not me) the limited choice of TV curating content. Now every god damn group on earth can have it's tiny little channel in the background.
I enjoy watching good/pro Halo/COD players. I'm not at that level myself and don't have too much time to play, so it's cool to learn new tricks from the pros.
I watch streams to socialize, thanks to the chat function. I usually don't care much about the game they play and I only watch streams with less than 30 viewers.
I thought the same thing when I learned of all the "Let's Play" content on YouTube. There are probably millions of hours of videos of funny people casually playing video games on YouTube. The content comes out so fast, and you can only consume so much of it.
i do that. the watching is not passive, you can discusss with the streamer and affect his actions or get explanations on a specific question. i use it to get better at go game.
> What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content.
Who has time to write comments on an anonymous forums? Who has time to watch TV? Listen to music? Who has time to watch a couple of men kick a ball around? People make time if it is something that interests them.
> you have to sit down and watch for hours every night
You don't have to. You could just check in for a few minutes while you are eating or programming or cleaning or anything really. Also, many streams are available for viewing "offline". You don't have to be there for the stream. You could watch it later.
> Who does that?
Tens of millions of people?
> I imagine it's mostly students and single young professionals.
Probably. It's usually the younger generation that adopts tech and then slowly the older generation follows.
Not sure why you are so shocked? What's the difference between twitch and TV or watching the world cup? At least with twitch there is interaction via chat.
