“This is the nineteen-ninety-three- nineteen-ninety-four, back to back, block buster video game international champion”. This was the first sentence when video game streamer Dr. Disrespect made his return on live video game streaming platform Twitch for 400.000 concurring viewers. After one hour of gameplay viewers donated more than $15.000 to the streamer. “The Doc”, as Dr. Disrespect often is called, is estimated to earn at least $200.000 a month with live streaming (Gamebyte, 2018)
The first thing that you might ask now is: why are people watching other people play video games? It is unintuitive for many people as to why watching video games would afford any meaningful gratifications since it has been assumed that watching others play does not provide the same thrills as playing video games by oneself (Sjöblom and Hamari, 2017). As unintuitive as it may sounds, Amazon recognized a huge potential in this type of entertainment and bought the biggest live video game streaming platform Twitch for almost €1 billion dollars in 2014 (McMillan and Bensinger, 2014). The potential probably is shown in the communities that are formed around streamers and the millions of viewers that are active on the platform.
The second question is, why are people donating to live video game streamers? Watching streamers is completely free, so why are people willing to spend their hard-earned money to someone who is playing a video game behind a webcam? This particular phenomenon is studied by Sjoblom and Hamari (2017) and Gros et al. (2017). Both are concluding that social motivations are one of the main reasons why people are donating. Community members want to support the streamer financially so that they have an incentive to continue streaming. Furthermore, viewers want to be part of the community of the streamer.
All you need to be a streamer is a computer and a video game. When you are able to build a large community, you have a good chance on becoming just as profitable as The Doc. And yes, a wig and a fake moustache might also help…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpcakw05nVs
References:
Gros, D.; Wanner, B.; Hackenholt, A.; Zawadzki, P. & Knautz, K. (2017), World of Streaming. Motivation and Gratification on Twitch’Social Computing and Social Media. Human Behavior’, Springer International Publishing, , pp. 44–57.
Hamilton, W. A.; Garretson, O. & Kerne, A. (2014), Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play Within Live Mixed Media, in ‘Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems’, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1315–1324.
McMillan, D. & Bensinger, G (2014), The Wall Street Journal. 25 August 2014. Retrieved 17 April 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20140828174620/http://online.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-buy-video-site-twitch-for-more-than-1-billion-1408988885?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj
Sjöblom, M. & Hamari, J. (2017), ‘Why do people watch others play video games? An empirical study on the motivations of Twitch users’, Computers in Human Behavior 75, 985 – 996.
URL: https://www.gamebyte.com/streamers-make-millions-year-heres/
