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.
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.