I’ve noticed that my girlfriend’s 12 yr old son and his friends only play games with multiplayer. Fortnite is what they’re playing now. Before it was overwatch, GTAV, minecraft/terraria. The last single player games I saw him play were skate 3, Undertale, and Sonic Mania. If a game or another form of media is virally memed or marketed heavily on youtube, he’ll will be interested. Recently he’s been watching fortnite videos nonstop. I sometimes see him watch LP’s of single player games and i think he would like to play them, but like all the other kids, he only likes spending money on cosmetic items in fortnite or lootboxes in other F2P games. I try to encourage him to try other stuff I have in my ps4 library but it’s a hard sell. I think when he’s a teenager he’ll be more interested. Right now, squading up with his “boys” in fortnite, comparing the new cosmetic dances they have, and yelling out new problemtatic jokes they heard from youtubers infected with the spreading corruptive reach of 4chan meme culture is too enticing. It’s bleak. I don’t think LP’s affect sales negatively among adults or children. After all, Youtube is the only chance a single player game has to sell among kids. Multiplayer games, F2P games, and lootboxes are the main culprit at the moment imo.
I watch of lot of LPs, but I often use them as background. I’m old, so I am guessing my resource allocation is a little different. I have money, but what I am lacking is time and energy. A game that I am only interested in passing might end up on my Let’s Play list while I relax after a hard day.
I do watch LPs in two other general situations:
- the game is beyond my ability to play (Enter the Gungeon, Bloodborne)
- I already have the game and love it, and I am interested in seeing what other people did (Battletech, Darkest Dungeon)
In most situations, I can’t say that streaming/LPs affected my decision to buy. I will say that they impact my appreciation of a game.
HItman and Yakuza 0 here. If i kept up with the XCOM run I would have got that too.
Only shit ones, really. Like, I might have been tempted to get Detroit on sale at some point if I couldn’t just watch the whole thing and probably enjoy it a lot more. But if the game is good then a stream is only ever gonna make me want to play it more.
It is very possible that both A) Capitalism is a terrible system that actively works against people’s survival and B) devs should be compensated for their labor by people who interact with it, are true statements. Capitalism sucks, but it’s also the system the people making these games have to survive in right now. That’s not to say someone watching an LP or stream turns into a lost sale—it could very much be moving towards how criticism and reviews work in other mediums, where they’re widely accepted as free publicity for something that can’t be experienced in full through them—but in the way it’s currently constructed and construed, someone is interacting with a work without respecting the labor involved in making it in a way that’s not widely accepted or normalized in other mediums. It kinda feels like the valid concern of “X indie dev deserves to be compensated for their labor” is being discounted because “well the way the system is constructed sucks for them anyway, so why should it matter?”
Basically, capitalism is terrible, but it’s what we have to deal with right now, There can be multiple problems at work, and the existence of the overarching one shouldn’t discount the existence of a smaller one. We can enjoy participating in a thing and still recognize that it’s constructed in a way that, under certain circumstances, may be exploitative. And using an overall ideological argument to displace one about how people actually live their lives feels off to me.
If it’s a game I’m not able to play, I’ll watch a stream of it.
Don’t own a pc, so for example the Stellaris waypoint streams have been fun, and Xcom 2 (heard the ps4 version of WR of the Chosen is terrible)
If I plan on playing it, will avoid all streams/video content.
Sometimes making a purchasing decision but honestly your average person making gaming videos are so grating i’ll put it on mute or fast forward past the talking and self promotion.
Retro games aren’t really part of this conversation? That’s what a lot of my stream watching will be
video games are TOO EXPENSIVE and buying every game i want to have a look at would bankrupt me after like, 2. Not only that but most games, let’s be honest, are a bit shit and I really don’t want to pay 50 bucks for every mediocre experience that comes my way. At the same time, most LPers are also, a bit shit so I don’t go out of my way looking for games to watch - I sub to maybe 1 “current game” LP channel i actually enjoy (Men Drinkin Coffee) and the rest (which isnt many) are variety streamers like Tietuesday or hyper specific interest channels.
No. My main motivation for watching Let’s Play are to watch the LPer experience the game, not for me to experience it for the first time. It’s like giving your friend a good book that you’ve finished and wanting to talk about the twists and turns after their done with it, except you get to see their reactions in real time.
Streams are mostly the same. If I’m watching a stream of a single player game, it’s because of the player not the game. Whether that be a friend, a streamer I enjoy, or a speedrunner.
In fact, I’ve bought MORE games because of streaming and let’s plays, as when I had more money I would sometimes gift streamers a game they wanted to play if I wanted to watch them play it.
I’m glad that indie devs get compensated for our labour. We get this via selling our work, video games. We get this via accepting donations towards our game projects like via KickStarter.
If we wanted to be compensated for people watching movies then we would, as is absolutely a normal career path, make movies. We could use many of the same tools and then release those movies and see if anyone wanted to pay to watch them. Totally normal (it’s somewhat questionable how well any of us would do compared to the established indie movie makers already creating pretty amazing stuff). But this is not what we do when we release a game. We made a game because it’s not a movie, we decided to sell these interactive experiences which it is absolutely normal to share and interact over - to show as performances after we have sold that initial script / setting / stage. If we wanted to sell a movie, we would probably not also sell it as a game version at the same time.
We also didn’t spend months or years attracting and maintaining an audience. We didn’t slowly grow that following via interactions, living off the tips and a slice of ad revenue. We didn’t do the labour that is involved with streaming. The labour that is even less often well paid or even acknowledged as labour that should be properly compensated. We definitely should respect the labour involved in all of this rather than discounting it. We should understand the entire ecosystem of streaming and what it actually means to the audience who follow LPers and other streamers (and how those audiences follow the personalities, not the games, indicating what is the primary draw).
No. Sometimes, they get me interested to try a game I didn’t hear of.
What keeps me from buying them is not having enough money. That’s pretty much the big deciding factor for me when it comes to this hobby.
My biggest issue when it comes to the interaction between the game community and the streaming community is the violent, knee-jerk reaction everyone has to even modest restrictions on streaming. When Persona 5 came out and Atlus postured that they were only going to allow for streaming of certain parts of the game, people collectively lost their shit. When Nintendo came out with its weird revenue sharing system, everyone circled the wagons and beat their chests. There was a bunch of communal handwringing over Campo Santo using DMCA takedowns against Pewdiepie.
I’m of the opinion that if a publisher, or a dev, or whomever is fine with allowing streaming of their games then more power to them, but the instant vitriol for anyone who dares to suggest that maybe you shouldn’t put their stuff online seems misguided. People just immediately assume that streaming and exposure are a net positive for any game ever, and that the makers of the game should be thrilled that someone is giving them that exposure. That really should be a choice for the artist to make, should it not? Streaming and Let’s Plays have become so entrenched into expectations that it seems like business suicide to fight against the tide unless you’re a massive player like Nintendo. Campo Santo could pull a stunt like that because Firewatch had been out for long enough that their continued existence and avoidance of crippling debt were no longer an immediate concern. If they had made that decision the week of release, things might have gone very differently.
I think this kind of thing is super subjective, but for me personally I rarely watch streams of narrative single-player games. The ones I watch tend to be for either multiplayer games or ones that are more focused on scenarios and tactics (such as strategy games) that can play out differently. I’ll sit and watch someone play XCOM 2, but not so much The Witcher 3.
Additionally, streaming allows me to get a better idea of the way the game actually works in a way the slickly produced trailers do not. As another poster mentioned, this is why the Quick Looks at GB were so amazing when they first started. I get to have a better idea of the way mechanics work and the tone of a game before I decide to purchase. More often than not, I will actually buy a game because I watched a stream and it intrigued me more than the trailer did.
I think it’s a positive thing for the industry as a whole, but I recognize that I’m viewing things from a very specific lens.
I look at it from the opposite direction.
The second someone suggested that suddenly by buying a game (the traditional way of paying the money required to own a game and use it as part of a stage for your own production) you no longer owned the game, people started to wonder exactly how much less there was to buying a game today than before. The previous right to use that copy of the game was being eroded (during the same period of erosion of other rights like the right to hand a copy to a friend to play once you were done via the digital transition). It seemed like everything was only going in one direction (and despite industry leaders selling new hardware based on the ability to record and stream games - implicitly indicating this was not some shady stuff but absolutely something to expect to be able to do).
When Nintendo claimed that they had complete ownership of everything that could in any way be considered derivative works and that there was no fair use or transformative exemption (even making press unsure if they could continue to cover Nintendo media due to the use of copyright strikes in cases that were clearly fair use criticism and news reporting) then everyone started asking if this was really where things were going?
When Campo Santo decided to use a DMCA strike to assert that a video from someone extremely well known for marketing his videos based on his personality and not the game being shown, they similarly created an adversarial environment where developers were free to remove criticism of their games from YouTube under the claim that they owned every frame of footage that could possibly be created in the game and that there was no such thing as a transformative fair use. This has since be used by several objectionable developers to censor criticism.
We’re yet to see any actual legal action that provides even guidance for where the actual line is between infringement that should be suppressed and fair use. We could easily look at how certain Minecraft LP series are far closer to Top Gear than recording a movie from a screen and posit that if that isn’t fair use then we’re all in trouble because whoever owns the copyright to the wallpaper in our own homes can now claim ownership of our family movies filmed there via ownership of the copyright on the visuals of the set in which we filmed. Should we have purchased the $5000/yard version of the wallpaper that comes with a right to film it? Do we need to worry about buying even more expensive homes or paying double rent to get filming rights?
None of this is solidified but I generally find it extremely concerning when derivative small industries like streaming are pounced upon by major corporate entities like Nintendo as a new source to be squeezed for additional revenue. Also, when we talk about not ignoring compensating labour, to turn around and completely ignore the labour of streamers seems a particularly bad place to start a discussion.
Only if the video shows that the game in question is bad or that I wouldn’t like it. Otherwise, the game isn’t really the point. I’m watching for the player’s personality.
I think you’re extrapolating a little bit beyond my original point when we’re getting into things like wallpaper.
All of these things work on sliding scales because you’re never going to come up with a system that is objective and quantifiable. How much of a movie can I show in a video I make discussing its themes? There’s a medium somewhere between “not a single frame” and “the entire thing from credits to credits” but good luck hammering that down with specificity in a way that works across the board.
I keep talking about That Dragon Cancer because in the world of games it’s relatively unique. I can, at this very moment, pull up a number of videos that go through the entire experience from start to finish with a postage stamp video of someone who talks on and off a little bit for two hours. I can find videos with NO commentary at all, just the entirety of the game from start to finish, some with ads no less. That’s very different from wallpaper appearing in the background of a movie, that’s like making a movie called “My Living Room” and having a close up of a TV that plays Jurassic Park to completion. Yes, I know games are interactive and there’s never going to be a perfect parallel between the two things, but you can see the point.
While larger companies and shitty actors can certainly abuse the system, it also means that people who aren’t giant corporations get more or less no say in what happens with their work once its released into the wild. Ignore the Sonys and Nintendos of the world for a moment, if someone small and independent makes the decision to not allow an entire play through of their game to be put online, people eagerly jump down their throats over it. I’m not trying to defend shitty things, but I do think that the automatic reaction of all streaming and let’s plays are a universal positive isn’t a great default position either.
Absolutely not. If not for the myriad of streams of God of War and the Waypoint streams of Wolfenstein, I would have never considered buying either game. I had this belief that I would never care about either franchise, thinking both would never overcome their shallow origins, but available streams and footage convinced me otherwise. And then there are games that I wasn’t even aware of before I saw bits and pieces of a stream or LP that I ended up purchasing (Ori and the Blind Forest, for example). I’ll admit, there have been times when streams and LPs have convinced me not to buy a game, if it appears more disappointing than I had hoped, but it goes both ways in equal measurements.
My main reasons for watching LPs or streams are, to echo what Devour mentioned, to view the streamers experience with a game, and also enjoy them as people interacting.
I think it’s fair to draw comparisons between watching a full playthrough and pirating it, in particular story based games, but I also believe theoretically that someone who watches a full playthrough online, might be too short on disposable income to have the ability to get it in the first place, or are content with that experience and wouldn’t buy it anyway. (or maybe it’s a game that’s more interesting in a morbid curiosity sense rather than an experience you’d want yourself)
Personally if a game gets good word of mouth and I like what I’ve seen and heard from podcasts, quick looks, streams, or let’s plays, I’ll decide to buy it, and sometimes you watch a game and you can tell it’s not for you, it’s just informative.
I’ve even gotten games I’ve watched playthroughs or long stretches of to support the developers, though if it’s not something I’m interested enough to get then and there I’ve often gotten it on sale, which is still copy sold for the devs.
It’s hard to say if streaming and let’s plays have affected game sales in a dramatic fashion; people make their decision on how to spend their money via a plethora of factors, and sometimes a game might just be poorly marketed or gotten sold to a small niche, happens all the time, but it’s certainly a valid discussion to have.
Games shifting design decisions to be more stream friendly is a tad bit scarier to me, like the streamer who offered a dev unsolicited advice on how to make their game more engaging for a stream audience that was discussed on an E3 episode of WP radio, I don’t like the idea of “influencers” influencing game design.
For me it’s the other way around. I don’t watch Let’s Plays of single player games because, even being in a situation where I don’t have the hardware to play most games made in the past 5-7 years, I only play single-player games and what if sometime down the line I want to play Until Dawn? Or Alien Isolation? I don’t want them ruined for me. I recently came across a game on itch.io called Paratopic that looks absolutely incredible, but I can’t afford to buy it at the moment. It’s apparently only 50 minutes long and linear as well, so it’d be easy for me to watch someone play it on YouTube rather than play it myself but there’s no way that experience would be as good or immersive, so I’m just holding off altogether. It’s less about me feeling like I’m committing piracy than wanting to experience things the optimal way.
I’m also the guy who never watches trailers for movies I already know I’m interested in.
The only single-player streams I like watching are PS1/PS2 era horror longplays (as opposed to Let’s Plays, there’s no player commentary to ruin the atmosphere) because those games would be exceedingly difficult to play in any way and they’re usually so esoteric and nebulously designed that even given the chance I’d never get more than an hour in before giving up out of frustration. Watching someone wordlessly speed through Silent Hill’s labyrinthine ass in 4 hours is a real trip.
Well. That was never the case before? Yes, first sale doctrine protected physical copies in a way that digital copies never really benefited from, but owning a physical copy didn’t let you publicly perform the IP (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Pictures_Industries,_Inc._v._Redd_Horne,_Inc. ). True, nobody cared if you called all your friends together for movie night in your house, but that’s not what streamers are doing either.
(As an aside, I am not saying that Redd Horne isn’t a dumb case (it is) nor am I defending the idea that IP owners SHOULD be able to perfectly control all public performances – just saying that the law has mostly been that they can, barring fair use, which usually takes more than ‘I added my face in a box at the bottom’.)
All of the following scenarios seem pretty distinct: 1) using some footage to present a review/argument, 2) playing a game that is essentially a toolset (like you said, Minecraft) or even any other game where your input is essential to the video (say, speedruns or competitive MOBAs/shooters), 3) playing a game where your gameplay is adding something but not a whole lot (e.g., story-heavy RPGs), and 4) playing something like That Dragon, Cancer or Edith Finch or Gone Home, where you are adding close to zero. 1) should probably be transformative. Many types of 2) are arguably transformative – the skill of the player is adding something significant to the video. But I would probably not try to make the argument that a straight-up playthrough of a full game under 4) is transformative.
You’re absolutely correct that a large part of the problem is that there is very little legal guidance on where that line in the sand is, and yes, corporations overreach and bully the little guys. But I think that it’s extremely unlikely that all streaming use is fair. (To also analogize to piracy, I’m from an east Asian country where piracy does significantly hurt content industries – anecdotal evidence, but in my experience, as often as it may be true that someone who pirates something wouldn’t have paid for it in the first place, it’s at least as often as true that people like free shit and will choose to pirate something that they could and would pay for except they don’t have to.)
…eh, I don’t really agree with this point because if you have the right people doing an LP, you can get an experience none of the original works could create, comedy or the sharing of personal expression. In order for this point to work, it has to ignore the personal addition creatives can add. While there are definitely derivative streamers and LPers, the same can be said for just about any form of media in existence.
Arguing against streamers or LPers in how they use IP is similar to arguing against film or TV riffs, which is something I never see get challenged the same way. My best guess as to why is that riffers have had more time to work out what their work actually is, and they don’t have to churn out content as much. There’s less quality in LPs or streaming because a ridiculous amount of content must be made to make the practices financially stable, and they’re much more approachable to the common person to attempt and therefore delude the quality pool with over-saturation.
I should also clarify that I side for LP and streaming, mainly because I find modern IP control mostly a way for parasite corporate suits to make money off of actual artists. However, I also think that actual creatives should have rights over their own work, so while I hate Nintendo’s gross behavior because it’s basically a larger corporation weaponizing beloved art they helped fund to leech off transformative works from far poorer artists, I’m also fine with Santo throwing a takedown at PewPieDie because it was in response of the man’s public racism and they desire to take a moral stand and not have their art associated with a toxic element like that.
Basically, I’m sort of in an intent viewpoint, where I distrust most actions by large companies because of the very nature of said companies, but do side with smaller artists. It helps smaller artists generally don’t fight against LPers or streamers because they recognize this is a way to get effectively free advertising.
There is an argument to be made for short narrative games not benefiting as much, though the success of Anatomy muddles this, as does the clever advertising work of The Stanley Parable releasing a demo for LPers specialized to get emotional responses from the LPers and viewers alike to grow interest. I think the bigger question to be asked is how developers can make use of this growing field for their own benefit.
My favorite example of this is probably Party Hard’s streaming options, allowing the audience to vote for random events for the streamer to deal with.
