Amazon’s Purchase of Twitch Prompts Culture to Briefly Acknowledge Video Games Are Big Deal

Twitch almost certainly has
more viewers per month than any individual cable news network.
The game-streaming service
boasts more than 45 million visitors per month, all there not to
watch talking heads or actors, but their own peers playing video
games.

This week Amazon announced it would be
acquiring Twitch for nearly $1 billion dollars. The purchase of
Twitch by a major online player did not come as a surprise by
anybody who follows gaming news or is a fan of the company. There
had been rumblings that YouTube was looking to purchase Twitch and
add it to its online empire. But sources say Google’s plans were
hampered by fears of anti-trust problems (which helps illustrate
how out of whack our anti-trust regulations have gotten. Twitch has
been around less than five years. Nobody could reasonably argue
that their current domination of the game-viewing market is set in
stone and is immune to the rise of new competitors).

The news has prompted media explainers (like
this one from Vox) to spread the word to those who
didn’t know what Twitch was. Given that video games are now the
most popular form of entertainment in the world, it feels akin (to
somebody who plays games anyway) to a media outlet deciding it
needs to explain how a rock concert works.

There does seem to be a bit of cultural surprise that an
audience has developed just to watch other people play video games.
It can seem a bit odd at first. It’s different from watching
football or ballet. Most of us can’t do those things, at least not
well. The whole thing about video games is that everybody can play
them. Why watch somebody else play when you can just play
yourself?

Before getting into the reasons why Twitch is popular it’s
helpful to remind that video games have also been a very social
pastime, even before the rise of Internet social media sharing
systems. The loner gamer in the basement was never, ever a
stereotype that had roots in accuracy. Arcades were hangouts for
teens in the ’80s. Home console systems were always designed for
multiple players going all the way back to the Atari. Pong
was for two players! Video games are things that people actually do
together, and so growing ties between gaming and social media
platforms should surprise nobody.

There’s been a significant rise in competitive gaming, often
referred to as E-Sports. In Reason’s look at “Video Game Nation”
earlier in the year, we highlighted one heavy-hitter, League of
Legends:

The League of Legends community is dominant on Twitch.
At any given moment there are tens of thousands of viewers watching
some of the top players compete around the world, not just in
America. Riot Games has used Twitch to help build its audience and
streams its competitions through the service. Other major games
with a competitive base, like Starcraft II and Street
Fighter IV, also have tournaments streamed live through
Twitch.

In a sense, these games actually are very similar to watching
professional football or ballet. While anybody can play these
games, it takes a significant amount of skill and proficiency to be
really, really good at them. This is not Starcade, that
awkward effort from the ’80s to make a game show connected to the
gaming culture from back in the day:

 

So gamers themselves like to watch these streamers to see
amazing plays and skilled competition and even learn from what they
watch.

But that’s not all that goes on at Twitch. The site hosts
players who stream games as a way to help raise money for charity
(I’ve written about this trend
here). It’s gaming as a shared philanthropic experience, not
unlike the ice bucket challenge going around right now to help fund
research to fight ALS.

Some streamers develop enough of an audience that they can
actually make money from their gameplay, with subscribers actually
paying them and streamers making a cut from advertising (just like
people with very popular YouTube channels). There are channels
where the streamers are draws because of their personalities as
much as the games themselves (similar to many YouTube gaming
channels).

There are other useful benefits of streaming, not that it needs
to be justified for utilitarian reasons. We have reached an era of
gaming where the market is flooded with so many choices. There are
new video games released every single day. Streamers serve as
real-time reviewers allowing potential consumers to see the product
in action before they commit their money. It can be a huge boon to
indie game developers when something they’ve made catches on with
popular streamers.

It is time for the both the media and the public to stop being
surprised at the size of the gaming community and the amount of
revenue it generates. Video games are bigger than movies.

(Full disclosure: I occasionally stream games myself on
Twitch. Anybody considering tuning in should be warned that I have
turned into a middle-aged video game hipster that never plays
anything popular. Lately I’ve been playing Endless Legend,
a fantasy strategy game still in beta testing from a little-known
French indie game company. I am frequently the only person on
Twitch playing this game.)