A guide to playing many popular games on twitch, written even a few months back, is outdated much faster than even JavaScript framework best practices. As a consequence of this, content which is new has natural advantages over content which is not new. Content even a week old can be so out-dated as to be worthless, not just in theory but frequently in practice. In fact, the strength of the advice and the likelihood that the advice is outdated within a week are actually correlated, because game developers do balance patches.
From these observations, if you assume that people are watching gaming content to learn, you should be able to reduce confusion at the popularity of live content on twitch and start to get an understanding of why Twitch does not represent a step backwards.
Hasn't been updated in years, but still relevant if you don't mind reading the wall of text.
I think nowadays, the proliferation of educational streams on Twitch.tv could easily supplant the utility of this document. Streamers like Winter (twitch.tv/wintergaming) or pro-gamers like Grubby (twitch.tv/followgrubby) or CatZ (twitch.tv/CatZ) or Minigun (twitch.tv/colminigun) are a great resource, and are usually pretty good at answering specific questions and providing good tips to newbies.
i confess i am completely not understanding this trend in twitch streaming coding. i prefer asynchronous videos where i can speed or fastforward through parts. i understand the value in seeing people make and solve mistakes but that can’t be the only value in -watching- a live stream can it?
> Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started.
Sure, there are people who are early adopters of anything, including plenty of things that never pan out.
My mom certainly hadn't heard of Let's Plays in 2008, but she can name a few streamers now. To have predicted the success of Twitch is to say with a straight face that in the mid 2000s you thought that people who absolutely did not play games then (or even consider it) would regularly watch other people play games; Twitch probably has more concurrent users right now than there are people who had heard of a Let's Play before 2008[0]. To be clear, I'm not saying that you didn't predict it: I'm saying that realizing that Twitch would be as successful as it is today is uncommon.
> The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes.
Agreed. However, at the time the Washington Post famously opined on the Wright brothers that "It is a fact that man can't fly". A lot of the mockery they faced is probably apocryphal at this point, but certainly many people thought that powered flight was unlikely/impossible. Similarly, many of the early adopters of transistors were laughed at because vacuum tubes were the clearly superior choice [1].
My point here isn't that no one believed; some people have done a great job of reliably picking the right horse. My point is that for many innovative ideas, more people doubt than believe. And that (with the benefit of hindsight) it's easy to imagine you knew the right horse from the beginning.
Yeah, GP post is unnecessarily negative. I think this is a great idea and knew there was always a space for it.
Twitch has really changed the entertainment scene (millions of people individually consuming hours of streamed content a day). More importantly, there's a large subset of Twitch streamers who don't just stream for entertainment purposes, but for education as well. Often times, watching someone do a thing is a lot more instructive than reading about someone doing a thing.
There are people getting much better at video games by watching informative streamers. There's no reason to think that, eventually, live stream coding will be another popular form of learning to code as well.
GP post makes me sad, honestly, due to how willfully ignorant that opinion appears to be and the fact that it's so unnecessarily negative towards something that can legitimately help a bunch of people.
I would not recommend game dev on twitch, example: handmade hero, awesome project, super great guy, but it is nearly impossible to follow what is going on.
I started watching Twitch in 2014 for a highly specific purpose: watch video games played with skill and possibly interact with/support skilled gamers.
I stopped watching Twitch in 2018, when it became apparent that Twitch has less to do with video games and more with watching the streamer react to what's happening while feigning to interact with the viewers. When I watch Twitch today, I feel like I'm the one being gamed.
I loathe forced interactions, the incessant notifications, popups and added Twitch UI that clutters the screen, even when I maximize the video, making it feel like I'm watching the game through a pinhole. I hate the streamer's constant "thank you for the <X> months sub, <username>" that disrupts any gameplay immersion. In the chat, streamer's bots dominate with their !<command> walls of text while I can't type in anything because I can get banned for certain faces or just can't post at all unless I follow or subscribe (pay money).
Besides, it became increasingly more difficult to find skilled gamers because everyone started trend surfing. If SodaPoppin plays an indie game, all of a sudden everyone is playing it to leech off of the fact he can push any category to #1 in the Most Watched group. This leads to tons and tons of crud and brainless filler as streamers play low-value games designed to elicit shock reactions.
Why would a skilled guy play an obscure game for his 25 viewers when he can trend surf and grab hundreds of new followers, subscribers and viewers just by playing whatever SodaPoppin is playing? Twitch pouring money into dating content means a perverse incentive to trend surf to the max, game the audience and produce contrived drama.
Nothing of substance happens in that ~1h video as he plays Fallout 76, he just walks from one merchant to the next, buys stuff, plants veggies, kills 1-2 enemies, reads some text logs and the video ends. It's total filler, with no insightful commentary, no skill portrayed and nothing worth watching. The guy has over 1.2 million followers for no discernible reason. That's Twitch, rewarding the producers of filler.
The closest replacement I found was CarcinogenSDA Youtube channel that does old video game speedruns, most often in the "no damage taken" category. It's fascinating and comes in two versions: with or without the player's commentary. That's what I want—turn on a video game speedrun lasting 3-4 hours with no interruptions or the player's contorted face and just enjoy the show. If I want to know how he figured out a certain trick, I can watch the version with the commentary and that's that. No forced interactions, for the love of God.
The last fun thing I watched on Twitch were the Power Rangers and YuGiOh marathons in 2018, and even then only because of the 24/7 chat that made them fun.
I think it's more of an audience targeting thing, I'd guess there's not many people who are into competitive games and unaware of twitch.
For me personally, I watched twitch pretty regularly when Starcraft 2 was popular, to learn tips and tricks from players better than myself. It was more akin to watching game film than entertainment content to me.
>A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams
In my experience, Twitch recommendations seem to be based heavily on what you watch, so if that's what they're seeing its probably because they watched it at some point.
> The popularity of the service is driven by games they show,
The most popular content now seems to be Just Chatting and react content. These days you can get to see 4 levels of OTK streamers watching and reacting to each others' react videos, sometimes in some kind of circular dependency graph.
People don’t watch live streamers for the game, they watch them for the streamer. On the contrary, 90% of the value of the stream comes from the personality playing the game and 10% comes from the game itself. It is common for streamers to jump around many games because it was never about which game was being played.
A good example of this is DayZ, a game that was very buggy and had a lot of negative criticism, and yet it became very popular because streamers pushed it so hard. Even bugs and broken mechanics can be fun if you are watching streamers laugh at it
You could also consider the game to be a “set,” i.e. a digital space that the livestream is filmed within.
Twitch isn't just about playing games. There's a growing community of people like myself who use the platform to teach people how to write software. In my case as an opensource maintainer I use it as a way to break down opensource and introduce people to what the role entails.
I think the author ends up missing something about the social aspect that has shifted in video games. Other comments rightly point out that social interaction in video games is not at all a new phenomenon. But I do think the rise of Twitch streaming has legitimately changed the way we interact with video games (and with each other in the context of video games).
Streaming and watching streams is incredibly popular among Gen Z (and earlier generations to a lesser extent), and that creates different dynamics. There are more interactions in the vein of a streamer interacting with fans, rather than a bunch of people collectively playing a game together -- though there is still that too. These streaming channels also have communities that build up around them, so people watching are interacting with each other as well.
In some sense, gaming has moved from being solely an "entertainment-by-playing" industry, and added a level of "entertainment-by-watching" as well. I have fond memories of watching my friends play a game (as we passed the controller back and forth between levels/deaths), sitting on the floor in front of the TV with each other. But streaming communities focused around watching others play games feels like a new social phenomenon to me.
Author here. My idea here is that you can extract a lot of knowledge from watching people do real-world coding and twitch is an excellent venue for this.
Do you buy it? It's more time-consuming than just reading a tutorial, but so much missed when you don't see someone at work.
The one thing I'm not sure of is the best way to extract this knowledge. I try to catch myself saying, 'wait how did they do that!' or being surprised by something. Then I try to figure it out myself.
This was pre-Twitch, but I used to work at a company where the tech team after hours would play Age of Empires for fun. We kind of got into it, we would read strategy guides, blog comments over whether it was best to be Assyrians or Babylonians or Choson etc. Some people (not us) would really get into it and spend hours measuring things like how long it took for a catapult to get from one side of the map to the other, measuring each second and pixel carefully.
I'm sure if Twitch were around and some of the best players broadcast their games with live commentary we would have watched them for pointers. I used to play Quake and remember watching a pre-Twitch video of one of the best Quake players, "Thresh", and observing how one of the best (perhaps the best) Quake players played the game.
In terms of time, it's like people taking golf lessons to get a better swing and get their par down, or people reading chess endgame books to learn how to properly do a bishop and knight checkmate, or what have you. I guess you're right about students and single young professionals, as that is when I had the time to spend on improving my skill at various games.
> The quality of twitch channels is vastly influenced by the tools employed in them. The production behind popular channels is extremely impressive, it makes sense that these tools are popping up.
This is incredibly true: custom OBS plugins, custom graphics and animations, automatic triggers based on donations and subscriptions, game event integration, run timing, and especially tools that make it easy for streamers to engage without being distracted. Standing out on Twitch is about the streamer and their channel, not just the game they're playing; very few popular channels are just a game or game and facecam anymore.
> I wonder if there's a bit of game theory in play where it's impossible to be discovered when playing a megapopular game like Overwatch/Fortnite, and it's more advantageous to play relatively more obscure games.
I do not think most twitch streamers are trying to be professionals. I think most streamers are just trying to add more fun into their game time. In game theory everyone's main objective is the same, in this case measured in either revenue or viewers. In the twitch world most streamers are trying to maximize fun instead of viewers or revenue.
(Disclosure: I stream relatively obscure games, and know many other streamers in both megapopular and obscure games.)
Again, this is nothing new. Some streamers are even dipping their toes into game development (Reynad, for example; he's making a competitor for Blizzard's Hearthstone).
From these observations, if you assume that people are watching gaming content to learn, you should be able to reduce confusion at the popularity of live content on twitch and start to get an understanding of why Twitch does not represent a step backwards.
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