“Soon, ridiculing the idea of watching other people play video games will seem ridiculous in itself.” (Stuart Dredge, the Guardian)
Nearly half billion gamers spend about 2,5 billion hours each month watching online gaming content. And while for many is difficult to grasp why watching other people playing games is entertaining the fact is, that this trend is only going to get bigger and bigger.
For many years Twitch.tv fostered this community of gamers. In fact, it can be argued that it was the place where this trend emerged; and until recently this was the reason that Twitch.tv dominated the gaming livestreaming industry. The buzz lured big players like Amazon and Google, who back in 2014 fought over Twitch.tv, with Amazon ending up acquiring it. But Google would not let the opportunity pass and in August 2015 launched YouTube Gaming to claim its share on the pie. In the beginning there were distinctive differences between the two platforms but as the time came by, both platforms tried to catch up one another ending up looking pretty similar. Even though their goal was to convince their audience to choose only one platform, ultimately viewers of gaming videos continued to use both platforms.
While both Twitch.tv and YouTube Gaming were basically busy copying each other, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Beam. Beam was a gaming startup of just 100.000 users, founded by 18-year-old Matt Salsamendi. One could wonder why Microsoft would go would bother to acquire a small startup. Well, all this time there was as gap. Viewers of livestreaming videos were unable to actually participate. But with Beam, gamers can crowdsource control of the game so viewers can engage with players in real time. Moreover, they can do all these with virtually no delay -something that distinguishes Beam from other game streaming platforms, which have several second delays. “We at Xbox are excited about this convergence between playing and watching, and want to provide gamers with the freedom and choice to have great multiplayer experiences across all of Beam’s platforms,” Chad Gibson, a partner group program manager at Microsoft’s Xbox Live division, said in a statement, directly “flirting” with the huge audience of gamers, showing that Microsoft is ready to take on YouTube Gaming and Twitch. For some, it was a bold move for Microsoft to enter a market dominated by successful streaming platforms – with a loyal audience- but it also seems to be a well calculated one. The market is expected to keep expanding and the audience itself is the one that defines the rules in this genre. Microsoft kept an eye out for it, acquiring a platform that delivers pretty much what the audience asked for. Whether this strategic investment is going to pay out remains to be seen. For the time being it seems quite promising.
Sources:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3742012/Microsoft-Amazon-s-Twitch-YouTube-buys-livestreaming-firm-started-18-year-old.html
http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/12/technology/microsoft-buys-beam/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/28/twitch-youtube-live-streaming-amazon-gaming-audience
Microsoft enters the game
18
October
2016
Hi Dimitra,
Thanks for introducing Beam to me, I was familiar with Twitch but had not heard of Beam yet.
The idea of crowdsource control really made me think of ”Twitch plays Pokemon” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon) which allowed users to play Pokemon through Twitch. It ended up being extremely popular with more than 1 million people having played it in total, and 121,000 playing simultaneously at its peak. I would not be surprised if this is where Beam got its idea of crowdsource control from. I’m really curious how this will turn out if it’s actually done in a structured way, as seems to be the case with Beam, since Twitch plays Pokemon was extremely chaotic.
Luca