Twitch Outranks YouTube In $3.8B Gaming Video Market

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If these stats are right, it is a rather impressive feat to see Twitch outrank YouTube like this.

Looking at a regional breakdown, Superdata found that North America is out in front with $1.49 billion in revenues, followed closely by Europe at $1.14 billion and Asia at $701 million. Latin America is a distant fourth at $270 million while the rest of the world only generates about $21 million.
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EODetroit said:
Twitch sold out for way too little, as I've said before.
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with all that money one would think they could add html5 video as a feature, but are still stuck with that crappy flash player. i hope i will see adobe flash gone in my life time, but somehow i doubt that.
 
EODetroit said:
Twitch sold out for way too little, as I've said before.
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It's probably because a lot of people are amazed and in disbelief that there is such a huge market for watching other people play video games.

If twitch didn't exist, and someone came to me and said: You know, I have this idea for a business. it's going to be a service that allows people to watch other people play video games over the network. Are you in?

My response would probably have been to laugh them in the face. There is no way that could ever make money, even if you could find people who actually want to spend their time watching others play games.

Then again, I made (and still do) similar disparaging remarks about Twitter. (who the hell wants a pseudo email system to send character limited junk and post it publicly? garbage).

I can also count on one had the artists on the top 40 charts in the last 20 years I recognize at all.

I don't get beards, flannel or a desire to ride a bicycle around a city.

What I'm trying to say is, despite being one of the biggest ech enthusiasts you'll meet, I guess I am old and out of touch :p
 
My son (13 YO) and his friends stay on Twitch. They sit there for hours looking at streams of League of Legends during the LCS. This I can understand. It's a competition.

They can also look at someone play Minecraft...THIS boggles my mind. It's like watching someone play with Lego's.
 
My coworker used to do the same. He would sit there and watch people play League of Legends or Hearthstone when it was slow at work. Same with a couple other friends.

Never understood why... maybe at work when you can't play yourself. Otherwise, you should be playing the game yourself and figuring out strats and stuff and not copying others.
 
I watch Twitch streams for the streamers who play shitty games and troll people. I find it entertaining.
 
Does Youtube even have a decent amount of live gaming? If so, they certainly aren't marketing it and almost no one talks about it...
 
Zarathustra[H];1041722547 said:
It's probably because a lot of people are amazed and in disbelief that there is such a huge market for watching other people play video games.

If twitch didn't exist, and someone came to me and said: You know, I have this idea for a business. it's going to be a service that allows people to watch other people play video games over the network. Are you in?

My response would probably have been to laugh them in the face. There is no way that could ever make money, even if you could find people who actually want to spend their time watching others play games.
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The problem is that you're looking at it as if someone is just sitting there in complete silence playing Super Mario World. That's not what Twitch, or any video-gaming videos really, is/are. Anyone can pick up Minecraft and play it and record themselves playing it...but only a very small portion of people who upload Minecraft videos to YouTube end up with any more than a handful of views. Why do you think that is? They're all playing the same game.

People are watching for the human element. The game is just a vehicle for that humanity. It's a vehicle for jokes, for schadenfreude as you enjoy someone else's frustration(or empathy as you think "Yeah, that part kicked my ass, too!"), it's a vehicle for commentary on the game itself or the game industry, it's a vehicle for storytelling where people use their imagination to fill in the blanks or expand on the story or even just make-up their own "alternate" story from scratch. Before you say "Well you could just use your own imagination" - so could you, but I bet you've read books and watched movies and TV shows before and they were all just pieces of entertainment provided to you by someone else's imagination. Is listening to someone's internal monologue of their Skyrim character on par with a great novel? Of course not, and I don't think anyone is claiming that it is...but it can be funny, especially with the right person delivering it. That's why people watch.
 
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