Hacker News Reader

Comment by flafla2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

There are hundreds of examples for popular streamers that tried to change games but needed to go back to keep their viewer base what makes the statement that its 90% the streamer not sustainable.

This does not make your statement wrong, but there are several other dependencies that do not allow this to be generalized.

No, what happens there is that some streamers are more linked to a specific game because maybe they are better or funnier, but that's it. If you go to Twitch and scroll down in Fornite you will see hundreds of people with less than 100 viewers which also confirms that the game means almost nothing.

Minecraft is linked to the growth of many Youtubers because its the most open game you can find and thus giving creators the biggest canvas to their imagination. It's like saying that 90% of a piece of art is the used material... It just doesn't make sense.

The Game is the layer that very often carries the streamer, if it changes the base connection to the audience changes too. This can easy create a imbalance or conflict in interests. If the viewer can't relate to the specific game they usually leave (change of audience).

So it highly depends on your Audience. If you are a variety streamer, your audience is used to the changing environment. However this does not apply to the vast majority. If changes in audience(game) can cause up to 90+% difference its hard to quantify it as negligible factor.

> If you go to Twitch and scroll down in Fornite you will see hundreds of people with less than 100 viewers which also confirms that the game means almost nothing.

Not at all. There are so many small Fortnite streamers because they want to become big like the popular ones and they know it is extremely hard to grow a stream out of the top 10-20 most watched games.

You can easily prove this: pick any popular but-not-so-much game and you will find way, way less streamers. To the point some have only 5-10 people streaming it, while having many tens of thousands of concurrent players. And yet only a total 100-1000 viewers combined are watching at a given time.

I think it is a little bit of both. IMO, it seems to be along the lines of how big the channel is. The bigger the channel, the more room and flexibility they have to move around games because the fans are more there for their personality than the game. Lower end channels don't have that freedom. It is almost like their fans are there for them, but only playing that specific game (whether it be for their skill in the game or maybe their knowledge of it).

I'd say the game is the "genre" and the streamer is an author. If you are someone who produces music or literature, and you do it in a popular genre, you will get some of the genre's public through radio streaming, antologies etc.

If you are good enough, people will buy your next album/book in the same genre. If you have a cult following, people will buy your next book/album in whatever genre.

That's a funny argument however as I don't watch streams. Aculite and Jackfrags are some of my favourite creators but I just want a tight 10-20minute video of good content. I'm not going to watch someone have half a conversation with someone else for 2 hours. If they decide to stop producing those and only stream I will no longer find their content. So arguably people remixing streams are adding 90% of that value to me that wouldn't be there before.

If that was true, they would be doing it without games - they would just be sitting there and chatting for example. But since they don't, it mostly means that for those streamers people would not have watched them without the game being played, so the question of whether the game or streamer is at 90% of value it quite open.

> If that was true, they would be doing it without games - they would just be sitting there and chatting for example.

This argument is flawed because 1) many streamers do exactly that, and 2) just because a streamer is not interesting when he's not playing a game doesn't mean that all the value is coming from the game. A juggler is not interesting without balls, does that mean it's the balls providing 90% of the value?

Given that:

* many streamers spend a substantial amount of their time just sitting and chatting with viewers, no game being played.

* if it was the game providing the value, you could just show a recorded playthrough without a streamer there to interact with the viewers, but this is not very popular.

* many streamers can play any game at all and draw a large viewership, but there are no games that any person can just start streaming and easily draw a large viewership

It seems fairly clear to me that the streamer contributes much more value to a livestream than the game being played.

"Just Chatting" is so popular on Twitch there's an entire category for it: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Just%20Chatting

Exactly, it is a different category with usually different people in it. And likely different people watching this category than the ones watching games.

And quite often it is the most popular category on the site.

No. The games are just the common ground between the streamer and the audience. Remove the common ground and it's not as much fun. Sure, the streamer's personality might be sufficient for a video by itself, but I suspect both sides want the game there to serve as a vehicle for progressing the social interaction.

That's only for extremely popular streamers. For 99% of them they can only play the one game that made them get viewers in the first place. They didn't get popular because someone googled "Ninja" they got popular because they were playing Fortnite and people wanted to watch fortnite get played. .1% of those guys get big enough they can switch games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com