The Impacts of Live Streaming on the Video Game Industry

This study examines how live streaming platform Twitch is reshaping the video game industry, arguing that its influence now extends across game consumption, production, marketing, and reviewing. The authors note rapid growth in the platform's reach, with total viewing rising from 292 billion minutes in 2016 to over 350 billion in 2017, and Amazon's acquisition of Twitch for nearly a billion dollars underscoring its commercial significance. The paper uses the rise of Rocket League, which climbed from the 165th most watched game to the top five within a month of its 2015 launch, as a prominent illustration of how streaming can drive rapid visibility and sales for titles that might otherwise remain obscure.

The analysis is organized around three cases. The first concerns streaming of newly released games and its role in informing consumer choice, which the authors argue is reshaping game reviewing as a viable alternative to established paradigms, with both advantages and drawbacks. The second examines how independent, niche, and older or even analogue games have gained unusual visibility through live broadcast, altering conventional understandings of a game's lifespan and commercial viability. The third considers the live streaming of game design and development, which the authors suggest may bypass costly or competitive formal training and traditional employment routes, representing a potentially significant development for the sector.

The findings rest on more than 100 in-depth semi-structured interviews with professional and semi-professional streamers conducted at gaming and streaming events in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Poland between 2016 and 2018. These are supplemented by several hundred hours of ethnographic observation at events and over 200 hours of observation across 200 Twitch channels, with sampling designed to capture a diverse range of content and streamers while attending to the dominant actors who shape the platform's norms and economics.