For years now, we have heard how the really big video game releases, the Grand Theft Autos and Halos, rival the big Hollywood blockbusters in terms of box office and cultural impact, but a big tech acquisition this week suggests that the gaming subculture is on the verge of having a rather more profound impact on the entertainment business.
Amazon splashed out $970 million (€738 million) for livestreaming gaming site Twitch, snatching it from the grasp of Google. It might not seem to be the most far-reaching tech acquisition of recent times, but there is something quite significant about this particular deal. Of course, it offers a fascinating glimpse of the future of Amazon, the one-time online bookstore that is now determined to become a technology behemoth across a range of areas.
And it offers valuable clues about the maturing state of the computer games industry. Twitch is essentially a kind of YouTube for gamers, where people can watch others play video games. That might seem a rather esoteric pastime, but it's popular enough to warrant a billion-dollar bidding war between Amazon and Google.
And there lies the real significance of the Twitch acquisition – what it reveals about the changing shape of televised entertainment, and how “watching TV” is going to be transformed in the coming decades.
As Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos put it when describing the acquisition, "Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon, and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month."
Watching others
For those of us whose gaming days ended with the Nintendo Gameboy, it’s hard to fathom the appeal of watching others play video games. How has Twitch scaled so quickly to 55 million unique viewers a month?
Surely the addictive qualities of gameplay come from actually, you know, playing the game, rather than merely observing other people play the game.
Well, a similar point might be made about live televised sport – the physical thrill of playing soccer, hurling, tennis or what have you, of mastering skills and competing against opponents, is quite separate from the enjoyment to be had from watching those sports.
In addition, when watching Twitch, gamers are often studying how to improve their game, while also following favoured players – a live chatroom allows broadcasters to offer tips and advice as they play.
Gaming stars
The most popular gamers are significant stars in the gaming subculture, earning significant sums from competition play and advertising revenue on networks such as Twitch.
The rise of Twitch, then, suggests that gaming is poised to become a sort of digital sport, with audiences as well as participants, watching not on broadcast television stations but via livestreaming websites. Most tellingly, there has been no shortage of people comparing Twitch to sports networks such as Sky Sports or ESPN – a sign that it is the broadcast model itself that is on the brink of major change, with the previously “niche” area of gaming acting as the Trojan horse.
