Absolutely. This is the biggest worry I have about the impact of streaming on game production. Streaming as a marketing device rewards games that stream well. That can be good: rogue-likes are great for streaming. Something like Slay the Spire has a ton of variety and surprises between runs, which helps it stay interesting for both watching and playing. Streaming also rewards shallow novelty like silly physics games, which seem great when watching someone entertaining play them for 15 minutes but often canāt sustain your interest if you actually pick them up and play them yourself. The thing that kills me, though, is puzzle games. They tend to stream terribly, since the real action is all in the playerās head. Streaming becoming a major hit-maker for indie games feels like it might have done real harm to one of my favorite genres.
As an anime fan I too have a lot of discourse over piracy and value. And Iāll admit I donāt see much value in buying things like comic books by the issue for something I will most likely read once and then somehow store it for perpetuity, but then has a hang up about digital markets lack of true ownership. Iāve only recently been, in a sense, guilted into buying manga because the other part is āif I want more of this thing to exist, I need to support them.ā
The true thing is both piracy and streaming have an effect on the mind space in the buyer, and that both exist now at a massive scale that could be hard to discount. It is both important yet amorphous.
Streams and Quick Looks have a great impact on my decisions to buy any game, let alone single player games. Iām not watching entire games through a letās play usually (unless Iāve beaten the game), but seeing a game in without it being a trailer edit or something letās me evaluate how a game looks and plays. Not how it feels of course, but often Iām looking for what systems and mechanics are incorporated in a game when Iām making a purchasing decision.
I think itās a mixed bag for developers really. Letās plays and streams can reveal aspects of games in a way edited trailers or reviews will not. It can reveal flaws in a game as much as it will reveal the fun hidden away. A trailer will hide away the obnoxious HUD and piles of grey loot scattered across the ground or uninteresting leveling system that will be highlighted by a stream. But a trailer for XCOM: War of the Chosen canāt sell the fun role-playing aspects on the margins of the game in the same way a streaming series can.
This is extremely off-topic but with Puyo Puyo Tetris coming to the US and being one of the first Switch games as well as Lumines Remastered, Crossniq+ and Tetris Effect on the way, the puzzle genre might be seeing a small resurgence?
In this specific case, itās important to remember the CD Projekt RED owns GOG. There is a huge benefit for releasing their games on their own platform DRM free, the value of driving users to their marketplace will pay dividends far more than the loss from piracy. They also pocket all the profit from sales on GOG without the 30~40% cut for sales on steam.
Considering the modern (billion players?) mobile market - I think puzzle games have never been bigger but theyāre definitely not anything like the $60 retail games of long ago and probably even moving away from $10-$20 indie digital console/PC titles.
Still love me some Zachtronics releases but those are also increasingly things that youād want to have on your tablet and phone so buying on Steam is kinda more of an early access perk (see discussions around Into The Breach) thatās only mobile for those of us with Windows tablets.
@Salarn: The alternative for CDPR would be to release on GOG with DRM. Thatās where the ātheyāre taking a risk if DRM was so obviousā comes from. Who owns the platform doesnāt really matter except in the way that they (as platform owner) actually created the no-DRM rules for the entire store.
I donāt think thereās a game that Iāve planned on buying (or at least was considering buying in the somewhat near future) where I watched a stream or Lets Play and then decided that satisfied my desire for the game. The closest example is maybe Firewatch, but I didnāt have a computer capable of playing that until about 6 months after it came out, so who know if I still would have had it on my queue at that point.
Like most everyone else has said, much more commonly streaming has introduced me to games Iāve never heard (even older ones) or warmed me on games I wasnāt previously interested in.
I think I share the opinion of most people here, so I wonāt go into how much LPs have actually convinced me to buy single player games that I wouldnāt have bought before.
I want to go into what the That Dragon Cancer dev said though. I understand that sales were disappointing and itās not a far reach to assume that streamers are hurting your sales. Something the dev said about their so called ālost salesā interested me though.
In the blog post, which I canāt access as of right now, the dev says this:
āBut we underestimated how many people would be satisfied with only watching the game instead of playing it themselves.ā
Can the people who were only watching the game be counted as a lost sale? Does the dev believe that every person who watches the stream, or at least a large number of them, would have bought the game had the stream not existed? Would these people who are āsatisfied with only watching the gameā really have all gone out and bought copies of the game? If someone is satisfied with only watching, doesnāt that mean that theyād never actually play the game?
I agree with Patrick when he draws the comparison between this and piracy. We donāt have any real data that can tell us whether a person would have bought a game or not had they not seen the stream. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence on the part of players and a lot of assumptions on the part of devs, but we currently havenāt found any hard numbers that prove more LPs/streams of a game lose sales.
There are many single player indie games that have been very successful and have a good amount of people streaming them. Night in the Woods comes to mind as an incredibly personal single player experience which has had numerous people LPing it. There are also countless SP indie games that havenāt made much sales, much less broke even. Can all these poor sales numbers really be attributed to LPs and streams?
Iām not ruling out the possibility that there are probably some people who were going to buy the game but didnāt after seeing the stream, but I think that means I also canāt rule out the possibility that the opposite happened, that someone who wasnāt as interested in the game bought it after watching a stream. There just isnāt a metric right now where we can accurately see how many of each kind of person there are.
I watch LPs of games fairly frequently and I wouldnāt say that an LP has ever influenced me away from buying something. I have at times decided not to buy something after seeing an uninterrupted stretch of a person playing the game like a giant bomb quick look but thatās as a result of me deciding the game isnāt to my taste, not a feeling of having already āgottenā what the game offers. I have bought games after being introduced to them by LPs or streams, both because they hadnāt been on my radar before someone I follow streamed it and also because seeing deeper aspects of it beyond the surface pitch intrigued me.
I think there are clear cases where streaming has helped a game - say, Goat Simulator. Similarly I personally have a bunch of games I bought because of awesome LPs, such as La Mulana.
I wonder if That Dragon, Cancer in particular is affected negatively because it is the kind of game that isnāt conducive to being played alone - but watching a stream or LP you can get shared emotional support.
I love the Quick Look format when I can look at someone playing a game badly and go āI bet I could do it differently/betterā and get the game to go do that. Into the Breach and Slay the Spire are games I recently bought for that exact reason.
The questions youāre asking are the heart of the philosophical debate, and unfortunately youāre never going to find an answer to them.
That Dragon Cancer is a unique example because by and large the interactivity is practically non-existent. Much like Virginia or What Remains of Edith Finch, the highlight of the game isnāt the bare-bones user input, but watching the experience play out. Watching these games isnāt drastically different than playing them in most respects outside of the occasional clever twist.
So in a situation like that, someone willing to sit down and watch the entirety of That Dragon Cancer is obviously someone how is interested in it to some degree and willing to sink their time into it, which is preciously the kind of person who would possibly spend money on it. You donāt stumble into a Letās Play of that game, and you sure as hell donāt stick around to the end because it auto-queued on youtube. Itās a game you only seek out a full play through of because you want to see what itās all about, and once youāve seen the entire thing thereās little to nothing paying to play the actual thing will get you other than satisfaction of supporting the devs. Would everyone who watched it start to finish have paid money to play it if it was the only option available? Of course not, but at the same time the answer also isnāt that not a single one of them would have either.
People can argue back and forth forever over what ratio of people would have paid that didnāt, and whether that number is greater or lass than people who were exposed that wouldnāt have been and paid. At the end of the day, that number is unknowable and it oscillates wildly between titles. Thereās no doubt at all that PUBG benefitted massively from streaming and would have been a fun novelty for a select few if it hadnāt grown the way it did with the constant exposure. At the same time, the fun in PUBG is the playing and youāll never recapture that experience passively.
Iāve noticed that my girlfriendās 12 yr old son and his friends only play games with multiplayer. Fortnite is what theyāre 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, heāll will be interested. Recently heās been watching fortnite videos nonstop. I sometimes see him watch LPās 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 itās a hard sell. I think when heās a teenager heāll be more interested. Right now, squading up with his āboysā 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. Itās bleak. I donāt think LPās 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. Iām 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 Letās 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 canāt 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 couldnāt 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 peopleās survival and B) devs should be compensated for their labor by people who interact with it, are true statements. Capitalism sucks, but itās also the system the people making these games have to survive in right now. Thatās not to say someone watching an LP or stream turns into a lost saleāit could very much be moving towards how criticism and reviews work in other mediums, where theyāre widely accepted as free publicity for something that canāt be experienced in full through themābut in the way itās currently constructed and construed, someone is interacting with a work without respecting the labor involved in making it in a way thatās not widely accepted or normalized in other mediums. It kinda feels like the valid concern of āX indie dev deserves to be compensated for their laborā is being discounted because āwell the way the system is constructed sucks for them anyway, so why should it matter?ā
Basically, capitalism is terrible, but itās what we have to deal with right now, There can be multiple problems at work, and the existence of the overarching one shouldnāt discount the existence of a smaller one. We can enjoy participating in a thing and still recognize that itās 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 itās a game Iām not able to play, Iāll watch a stream of it.
Donāt 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 iāll put it on mute or fast forward past the talking and self promotion.
Retro games arenāt really part of this conversation? Thatās 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, letās be honest, are a bit shit and I really donāt 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 donāt go out of my way looking for games to watch - I sub to maybe 1 ācurrent gameā 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 Letās Play are to watch the LPer experience the game, not for me to experience it for the first time. Itās like giving your friend a good book that youāve 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 Iām watching a stream of a single player game, itās because of the player not the game. Whether that be a friend, a streamer I enjoy, or a speedrunner.
In fact, Iāve bought MORE games because of streaming and letās 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.
Iām 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 (itās 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 itās 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 didnāt spend months or years attracting and maintaining an audience. We didnāt slowly grow that following via interactions, living off the tips and a slice of ad revenue. We didnāt 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).
