Re: Mixer Streaming Service - Ninja now streaming exclusively on Mixer
Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2019 2:05 am
I'm not sure what the big question is here. IP owners and media conglomerates blah blah will pay ridiculous money for "reach", eSports among the young in particularly has exploded, playing games well to earn a living is a legitimate career possibility (just as much as being a footballer or a doctor or a train driver or a pilot or whatever a kid wants, the point is the barrier to entry is literally zero) and games are making huge long-tail profits from monetisation like lootboxes, DLC etc., so if you get enough people onto your "games a service" or platform you're looking at LTV (lifetime value) proceeds per customer of potentially thousands of dollars. Times that by millions of users and you're looking at an investment of millions of millions of dollars for BILLIONS in revenue. This isn't about getting someone to buy a game anymore, it's about getting them to download it, try it, and make it part of their social routine (kids hanging out on fortnite or FUT) etc and then pouring regular small spends (pocket money) into that experience. All of this is free or low money at the point of entry but games have the unique ability to garner literally $infinite revenue over potentially years and publishers have finally realised this possibility thanks to the feedback loop of the Internet and social media (relevance / shared experience). This is what happens when football clubs form and you have nationally televised events, what happens when you have music that can be recorded and distributed. Games have just reached peak mass market / hysteria and spending follows. Imagine if we could have streamed our most intense Pokemon battles while playing those over the Internet (no friends required), instead of a few people maybe gathered around a GameBoy, well now you can do that with games on mobile devices. It's important to consider this is also part of "video game playing" becoming more than a past-time and becoming a sport, that is because people value the skill required to be good at a game and enjoy watching it being done well, whereas that wasn't really a thing in the past even though competitive scenes existed in for example Japanese arcades, that was all underground.
I do think the popular streamers deserve credit for how they appeal to their audience because it is not easy to sit on camera for hours and make gooseberry fool up / crack jokes / self-narrate, it's just a new kind of media that arises from something that was always there; smack-talk and the experience of social gaming but now you can do it all in remote locations, simultaneously over the Internet with millions of participants, all just for being willing to talk about a game or good at it or a bit of both. And with a medium that has for some time been chastised as childish or nerdy or something you don't talk about, it just all spills over as the old media loses relevance or the "voice of reason" dies off, "gamers" are having kids now and think nothing of it, it's just like reading a book or watching TV. It's only going to grow but personally (although I don't watch any streamers - I do find it helpful to check streams on PS Store for example to see how a game actually plays before buying it digitally, whereas previously I would read a review or have to watch a DVD or something or go to a demo pod) I like seeing these new media/presenters or hosts or performance artists or whatever they are grow.
It's just hard to reconcile that with equally ridiculous talents that pull in money like actors or footballers or what have you, it's all celebrity culture/hysteria/coying for role models, a new form of that, but it is still big money all driven by an economy / consume-share loop that is plain to see by just how much the industry is worth these days. That it's generating sub-industries, more than just a few websites or magazines etc. or occasional awful TV show but a whole new media of its own that finally makes sense for the medium. (Writing about video games? C'mon!)
I do think the popular streamers deserve credit for how they appeal to their audience because it is not easy to sit on camera for hours and make gooseberry fool up / crack jokes / self-narrate, it's just a new kind of media that arises from something that was always there; smack-talk and the experience of social gaming but now you can do it all in remote locations, simultaneously over the Internet with millions of participants, all just for being willing to talk about a game or good at it or a bit of both. And with a medium that has for some time been chastised as childish or nerdy or something you don't talk about, it just all spills over as the old media loses relevance or the "voice of reason" dies off, "gamers" are having kids now and think nothing of it, it's just like reading a book or watching TV. It's only going to grow but personally (although I don't watch any streamers - I do find it helpful to check streams on PS Store for example to see how a game actually plays before buying it digitally, whereas previously I would read a review or have to watch a DVD or something or go to a demo pod) I like seeing these new media/presenters or hosts or performance artists or whatever they are grow.
It's just hard to reconcile that with equally ridiculous talents that pull in money like actors or footballers or what have you, it's all celebrity culture/hysteria/coying for role models, a new form of that, but it is still big money all driven by an economy / consume-share loop that is plain to see by just how much the industry is worth these days. That it's generating sub-industries, more than just a few websites or magazines etc. or occasional awful TV show but a whole new media of its own that finally makes sense for the medium. (Writing about video games? C'mon!)