My personal opinion is that video game playthoughs are probably going to be incredibly disruptive to TV & Radio. In terms of cheap but good quality entertainment very little else can compete.
Watching someone else play a videogame is much more boring than just playing the game for myself.
It's sometimes fun to watch "let's play" of very old games for the nostalgia, but I really don't imagine families sitting around for a screening of a GTA playthrough.
EDIT: I'm aware that e-sports and "let's play" videos are popular with certain demographics. My argument is that this doesn't really constitute "disruption".
Not many people are going to throw out their HBO subscription and substitute it for videos of people playing minecraft.
You're missing the magic ingredient which is the personality of the person playing the game. Don't think of it as a "play through" only but rather playthough talk radio.
www.youtube.com/user/TheSyndicateProject 1.3M Subscribers 500M video views
Which is pretty impressive bearing in mind most of those channels haven't really been around that long, 2-3 years probably. But these guys are making a lot of money through ads and they're all pretty young, oldest is probably 24-25 of the three I just linked. Which is important because I think their audience is mainly in the mid to late teens although I don't know for sure.
Syndicate and PewDiePie are insanely impressive, they're literally generating millions of dollars in advertising revenue. Syndicate specifically has just bought a house (at 19).
Watching someone else play has some large advantages over playing yourself.
1) he has more skill at the game than you
2) he can put in the hours to get gear, friends to join his party, and other resources you don't have that let him do things you couldn't do
3) playing alone can be lonely. a streamer talking about the game provides some discussion about it. and streamers can be on audio chat with their friends, so you can be listening to a discussion between several people while they are playing. whereas if you play yourself maybe you don't have several friends at the same place in the game chatting with you about what you're doing
4) you can watch a stream on a computer that can't play the game
5) save money on buying the game (I often watch some gameplay footage of games i don't have to see if i'd like to play them or not)
So for example I watch http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp sometimes. He is in a WoW guild that I couldn't get accepted in, doing things in WoW I couldn't do. I want to see what high end WoW is like but I don't want to spend a year to catch up. So it's great to get a taste of gameplay that has a very high barrier to entry. I also save the $15/month for a WoW sub.
And for what it's worth, I bought guildwars 2 because of Kripp (for $60). It was fun to play the game while having his stream on. Why not do both in some cases!? I got tips from his stream and understood what he was doing better because I was doing similar things.
Kripp has 2500 viewers right now streaming google docs while he does math to optimize his hero.
Another big factor for twitch viewership is that you can view it while not paying much attention and doing other stuff like reading HN. I have his stream on mute currently, and have it muted for hours sometimes. Gaming takes a lot more dedicated attention than having a stream on.
For the sake of discussion, have you watched somebody play a game that you are familiar with, at the highest level? Speed-running (trying to break unofficial records for beating a game, fulfilling certain other conditions as well usually) is quite a bit of fun to watch as an act of phsyical and mental prowess, not unlike juggling or other stunts.
On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary).
This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).
1 million views worldwide is pretty niche in the grand scale of things. You would need growth on a massive scale before HBO is going to consider airing them.
Check out Machinima. They have 18 billion views in 2011-2012. That's billion with a B! Even with standard YouTube ad rates, that's a nice business. But they can bargain for higher rates because of their scale and audience demographic.
Nearly all their content is UGC gaming + parodies around that. Shockingly big market (shocking to a non-gamer like me). Twitch has a big opportunity.
Those don't really look like playthrough videos , they seem to be either live action stuff themed around games or shows that use video games as a mechanism for doing CGI.
Maybe for HBO, but a lot of basic cable channels would KILL for 1MM viewers. Heck, Mad Men only gets 2.6MM viewers an ep and that's a huge success. Not to mention the positive economic difference in production costs...
I remember a satellite channel experimenting with the idea of airing playthroughs of games. They were usually abridged to around 3 hours and did not contain the average playthrough banter you get with most LPs. Personally I enjoyed watching it when I with my dad. I have no idea if they're still around though or what the channel was called.
EDIT: I was trying to find it and found references to the show Cinematech although I'm fairly sure I watched a full playthough of Hitman and most of the cutscenes from Far Cry instead of just trailers over the course of 30min.
No one is expecting Yogscast to be aired on NBC. But, how many kids you know watch Television in any quantity even approaching how much they surf and watch youtube on mobile and PC? That's the future of entertainment. Kids are getting endorsement deals and doing direct ad sales because they can 360-degree no-scope kill in Battlefield 3 and record it using fraps and voiceover some clever lines or overlay it with dubstep.
People can only spend their limited time in only so many ways. Let's Plays dominate the front page of YouTube every day, with many videos getting 1m+ views in a few days only. Many people doing it are really entertaining and funny.
YOGSCAST has 2.4m subscribers. Wait until all of the kids watching LPs now grow up, have their own kids, raise them on the same stuff they enjoyed, and then sit around to watch and listen to their favorites.
Not true. Especially for games that require skill. For me it's extremely interesting to watch League of Legends pro players. They invent new strategies and create trends like popular champions to play with. I would argue that LoL is (much) more interesting to watch than Football (be it American or "real" football), Basketball X-ball, Formula 1 or you name it competitive "real" sport.
The previous post mentioned "Playthroughs" which to me suggests single player games recorded from start to finish.
I see it being unlikely that they will disrupt traditional "TV" that focuses on stuff like narrative driven dramas or documentaries. I don't see many people wanting to watch a playthrough instead of Game of Thrones or whatever. Maybe a small niche will, but not the mainstream.
In terms of multiplayer game tournaments then yes, perhaps these may be successful in the way that traditional sports broadcasts are.
And yet millions of people tune in to watch two groups of men kick, throw, and fumble an oblong ball back and forth down a 100 yard field every Sunday (in the US). They're not playing, so why tune in?
I've not spent a lot of time with Twitch, but what I've discovered is that it's not always about the games. There are personalities developing. Certain players are more enjoyable to watch, because of the way they engage the viewer. With team-based competition games, it can be a lot of fun to listen to players try to work together, and experience the, often hilarious, mishaps that occur during a competition. In other cases, it's just fun to watch someone perform at a level that deserves appreciation.
People like to watch other people. It's in our nature. Gaming has become increasingly social, so I don't find it at all surprising that gaming as a spectator sport is taking off.
Sure, but I don't know if that qualifies as disruptive.
They may supplement some peoples viewing but they aren't going to be a substitute for watching a good Drama show or whatever.
It's a lot easier to casually open up a stream of a LP in a browser tab, than to stop what you're doing, head to the couch, and commit yourself to an hour of video games. When you're playing a game you have to focus, when watching you can just tune in whenever like when tests are running.
Ofc, it is always fun to play it, but you are not watching just anyone that plays a game, but the best there are in it. It's always interesting to watch how the "pros" do it, even for a little while. It's not that different than watching sports...
And not every game will be popular, just like not every sport is, but no one can't deny that a game like league of legends is not getting hugely popular, and tournament prizes are going insane.
It's just that for now most people still see games as something you do "just for fun" not something you can live ofo, but that is changing as we see in this example.
A lot of people would rather watch experts play a sport than play it themselves. I have met quite a few people that sort of gave up on being good at Starcraft 2 and instead watch the experts play it.
Watching experts execute highly trained strategic and tactical skills in real time is fun for a lot of people.
e-sports are akin to fencing or sailing. they are fantastic sports if you have participated or researched them, and if you do not, they are utterly baffling -- to solve this problem you have to invest very very heavily in the user experience for the audience. having engaging commentators is only a small percentage of the problem.
america's cup even has the benefit of being reasonably cool at a high level: 70ft yachts travelling at 50 knots that might flip over and kill people at any moment. fencing has, well, swords. i have never met anyone else that understands nor follows these two sports.
i remain curious as to what e-sports has that make people think they would ever be mainstream.
It's more interesting to watch pretty much any sport if you have participated in it at some point.
I guess this is why soccer more popular than sailing. Most people have kicked a ball around with their friends before but wouldn't have access to a yacht.
With F1 for example , plenty of people have driven a car and probably at least wanted to drive it fast, F1 is basically that desire taken to it's logical conclusion.
With e-sports, the barrier to entry for picking up a games console or PC with some games on is pretty low. What will be interesting though is to see which games dominate.
FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.
> FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.
This may be true, but I'm not sure it definitely is.
FPS games have been involved in some of the biggest steps esports has taken over the past decade to get to where it is (from duel games like Quake 3 to team games like Counter Strike).
Right now it's true that FPS games aren't getting the same spectator numbers as some other genres, but it's also the case that FPS esports scenes aren't as big or high profile, as there aren't really any FPS games in a good enough position to compete with the likes of SC2 or League of Legends. Counter Strike 1.6 is dying and while it's newest sibling Global Offensive is picking up steam, it doesn't have the user base or the developer support (in terms of esports support) that Blizzard and Riot are showing their games. Quake Live made a decent attempt, but right now there aren't really any huge duel games. And the biggest selling FPS franchises, like Call of Duty or Battlefield, just aren't well enough suited to competitive play.
Maybe the FPS era of esports is over (at the top level, that is, it's still strong lower down), or maybe it's just waiting for the right title to take it back to the top - if that happens, we'll see if the spectator problem is actually a problem.
(I'm 10 days away from finishing the job I've had for five years working in and around esports, and largely due to that work, with a bit of personal preference added in too, FPS has a big place in my heart, so I certainly hope to see bigger things from it in the future. Not decided whether to stay in the industry or look elsewhere yet...)
I think the problem with FPS is that you have so many players who all have a completely different view of the game at any time. That makes it difficult to follow on one screen because you would have to keep switching between player's viewpoints which would disorient you to what is actually going on and make it difficult to see the state of play at a glance.
You might be able to fix this by showing a zoomed out overhead map and zooming in on parts that look like they are about to get interesting. Problem with this would be predicting which parts will be interesting to see, because you never know if someone is about to get sniped or whatever. With something like soccer there is only one ball so wherever the ball is will probably be where the most interesting play is happening.
I guess F1 would suffer from the same problem, but in that case there is just something exhilarating about watching a car take a corner at those kinds of speeds.
There are 1v1 FPS titles, namely Duel games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc. which don't have this problem.
For team FPS games it's certainly an issue, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. For starters, we've already seen that there are plenty of people happy to watch it (a Counter Strike tournament earlier this year saw 77k concurrent unique viewers for its final match).
Good commentators play a big part in this, it's their job to help viewers understand the big picture and understand what's going on all over the map, not just where they're looking.
One option, that hasn't often been used but is certainly a potential solution, is to have a slight delay on the broadcast, just 30-90 seconds to allow the cameraman/men to know what action is about to happen and show it appropriately.
Generally speaking, the view on esports streams is usually controlled by a single person, often one of the commentators, but with a slightly bigger budget there are other ways to play around to get the best footage. For example there was a league called the Championship Gaming Series a few years ago, they were News Corp. owned and had $50m in funding (there's a whole long story here that I won't go into) - one of the games they used was Counter-Strike: Source, and rather than the usual production standard of taking a feed from one client which changed views repeatedly, they had one client spectating each player, and a number of other camera angles set up, then did standard TV production to switch between them, which was a big improvement. But hey, those shows were produced by 13 (if I remember the number correctly) time Emmy-award-winning sports producer Mike Burks who had experience from NFL and a bunch of other sports.
That's a solved problem in professional sports broadcasting. They have dozens of cameras, and if something interesting happens away from the current camera they just do an instant replay from the camera that caught it best.
It's not quite the same in team FPS games, as most sports (that I can think of) tend to have one area of action at any one time, for example in soccer there may be 22 players on the pitch but there's only one ball - so replays to show what they missed are more to show better angles or other tactical plays, rather than missed action. But yes, this is still a useful (and currently often underused) tool in esports broadcasts too.
I really think if e-sports were to take off, it'd be in a dota genre game. It seems like the best balance of action, appreciating nuance and being able to understand at a very high level.
I have always found competitive FPS like Quake Live pretty boring since the players traverse the map in a specific way to capture weapon spawns and such. (vs. running around like a headless chicken.)
Not many kids grew up sailing. Most kids these days have a fair bit of experience with video games, first person shooters especially. They might not get the subtleties of some of the 'pro' level FPS games, but I think they would be able to spectate. Games like Starcraft and DotA pretty much require that you play the game regularly to appreciate them though.
Then again, the rules to football are fairly complex depending on how deeply you're concerned about player formations and stats, yet it's wildly popular. Starcraft can be simplified to 'blow up all their stuff' just like football can be simplified to 'get the ball in the endzone'.
International tournaments with $1+ million grand prizes are nothing to shug at. Couple that with the fact that anyone can play anyone else in the world practically instantaneously and that more and more people are playing video games recreationally every day.
They might not be the Premier League or the NFL, but South Korean Starcraft is certainly not far off.
I've heard that argument about Korea ever since I started following and working in eSports (around 2004ish). Yet, I'm still waiting on that big breakthrough in the USA/Europe. I'm afraid it will still take quite some time.
One thing to keep in mind with comparisons like that are that it's an average game against a weekend full of above-average games.
Still impressive numbers, but it's too easy to glance at them and think (and I'm not saying you were doing this) "esports getting more viewers than baseball!"
I have been checking out twitch more and more lately (big time waster) and noticed that it's a strong magnet for creating communities around specifics streams. Not only big time e-sports are attractive, regular dudes playing some games might be the biggest attraction in the end.
Absolutely. I follow Starcraft 2 primarily, and I make it a point to tune into Day9's show. Lately he's been averaging 6,000 simultaneous viewers for one show. That's not as impressive as the 100k views that watched the WCS European Finals this weekend, but it's lot more consistent.
Twitch is a great product and their app on android has come a long way. It is amazing that I can watch someone play my favorite game at 720p on my phone.
I've had a little professional contact with the Twitch guys, and they're all really cool (as well as having an excellent product). I think they have a lot of things about their service they could improve, but they certainly aren't sitting idly by.
i was just wondering if any of those "company X raised $Y" articles does actually ever mentioned how much shares were given away. was it 10%, 50%, 80% of the company?
