Hacker News Reader

Comment by kawfey | Hacker News Reader

This comes at no surprise to the game streaming community.

A number of popular gaming stream helpers, namely Harris Heller from Alpha Gaming [0], have kept streamers away from Mixer to focus on Twitch and hosting VOD/highlights on YouTube in order to best grow a community.

Facebook is a large enough platform that this might cause some trouble for Twitch, but we'll see. I think the gaming community is deeply seated around Twitch/YT. Since Facebook has already lost tons of younger users, and rejects anonymity, and doesn't have dark mode, I don't think this will turn out very good for Facebook.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCATWC1JSlhzmYeDbjnS8WwA/sea...

View on HN

The name "Facebook Gaming" seems really bad branding to me. That would be like calling Instagram "Facebook Photos" or something. It just doesn't fit at all. At least Mixer had some name ID and some high profile streamers locked into contracts.

This usually comes down to whether you need a FB id to sign into something. Its "Facebook" if you need to be logged into facebook to get to it. In this case, its a way to keep you on the Facebook site longer, instead of fracturing off another uninteroperable (inopreable, teroperable?) platform.

"interinoperable"? :)

"intraoperable" :D

Hey, something something Farmville...

They may put it under their Oculus brand.

Young people don't spend money on streamers like lonely men do.

"The Youth" are on twitch to burn mom or dad's free amazon prime sub, per month.. another reason twitches numbers are "high" compared to others.

Xbox could have spent that shroud and ninja money on free subs for Xbox gold holders.. and deliver more value, like the bezos-twitch prime sub shell game

What does an Amazon Prime subscription get you on Twitch?

One free sub to a streamer of your choice per month.

Is that not free? Sorry I use twitch purely as a way to do amateur streaming. Apparently I know very little about the viewership features.

On Twitch, "Subscribe" doesn't mean the same thing as on YouTube; it is a $5 monthly donation (except when a streamer has different tiers) that gets you no ads for that streamer and, depending on the streamer, exclusive emotes/chat room access. The typical type of subscribing where you are notified about a Streamer going live is called Following.

Where are the numbers on youth disengagement? Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing. If I were a streamer that gets $ from donations, I should really target 18+ anyway, who are old enough to have a credit card.

Also, it seems like FB Gaming numbers are really taking off, partly due to signing some big names from Twitch. [1]

Lastly, they actually do support gamertags, but I’m iffy on the anonymity concept being a negative here. Twitch has a problem with some toxic chats, users making throwaway accounts to get around ban, etc. If I were a streamer, this would be a great alternative for me to build a community with less overhead in managing the toxic parts.

All in all, it doesn’t have to be a “winner-take-all”; it’s nice to have some healthy competition in the market, even if the only folks that can do it are the biggest players (Amazon / Google / Facebook.) I’m just _really_ surprised that Microsoft couldn’t make Mixer work despite the tight Xbox integrations.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2020/01/09/face...

EDIT: grammar / spelling, as typing on a phone in 2020 is still tough

> Last I checked and from what they’ve said in investor calls, daily active users are still (!!) growing.

How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions.

(And, this being the modern Internet: How many of those new DAUs are real people?)

>How much of that is in US/EU users, though? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the growth is in other regions.

I agree, but it's not that surprising given how strongly Facebook has dominated the North American market. In North America DAUs are at 253 million [1]; if you assume that the population of all NA is ~369 million [2], you virtually have tapped the keg, so to speak.

Growth rates are going to decline once you hit market saturation like that, which has nothing to do with Product or user trends - just straight macro trends.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NAC/north-america/popu....

Facebook don't really embrace the idea of an alternate persona, in fact it's almost antithetical to them. Interesting to watch this play out.

It's still trivially easy to create an account on Facebook without using your real name.

The first LPT I taught me daughters when they started using the internet is that on the internet, you are a super hero - no one should know your real name.

While I do wholeheartedly agree that your online self should be an alternate, detached persona, for someone underaged, falsifying information on an account on FB is against their TOS. Their entire business model is selling data about the "real you."

I don't have children, and as a 20-something I know the struggle and seeming impossibility of avoiding FB products, but I try to avoid pouring my whole identity into them. It's rough when the social culture is rapidly shifting to "unless you put everything online you're not worth my time" or makes you one of those "privacy nuts."

Reinforcing the need to respect a company's ToS is not high on the list of principles I'm instilling in my children.

Sure I completely agree but these streaming personas are a business to some people and you might wake up one morning to the Facebook ban-hammer. Repeating the mistakes od depending on 3rd party services for a business model.

It's also very hard to keep that account anonymous due to the crazy about of data gathering Facebook does and the ways it used that data to recommend you to new "friends" and what not.

Your actual valuable personal data is your graph connections, not your node.

Once you start connecting, you unmask yourself quite easily - many have tried creating spare accounts (even with VPNs and separate browser contexts) and have quite quickly been shown their exist friend set as "recommendations by FB".

I normally use twitch but with fb mixer news I decided to take a look into fb gaming. I was able to create a page named "namrog84" and then comment on someone's stream and all they saw was namrog84.

I'm sure it might be possible to figure out which facebook real name made and owns that page. But at face value I was able to stream and comment under my alternate persona. namrog84. Without having to make a new Facebook account. They have a drop down in streamer chat if you want to use your real name or a name of a page.

With that said, I'm very hesitant of fb gaming streaming and this is my first ever time really looking at it.

Pseudonyms only work if you trust your cover won't be blown in a way that compromises your investment/safety. Is Facebook trustworthy enough for that?

I think the idea is that by using people's real names, the comments and community is slightly less toxic. I have no idea if this is true or not.

From what I've of FB comments, this is almost entirely untrue.

Look at all the dumb things people say with their real names on Twitter as well.

Discussion is civil when you actually cultivate civil discussion, not when you force people to use real names.

One word why I think this will work out well: money.

I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well.

FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical.

There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.

No way. This is literally exactly what Microsoft just did, and here we have the results. Facebook can try it, and they'll fail too.

There is absolutely _zero_ chance of younger demographics moving to facebook. I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance.

We've seen it again and again and again-- you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer. All either outright failed or stole at best a tiny fraction of market share.

There's so many examples of corporations trying and failing at this strategy that it's just a comic act by now.

A Facebook property like Instagram might do well. I think more than half of the streamers that I watch have an Instagram link in their Twitch profile.

Personally I hope for a good decentralized (actually decentralized, not d.live) streaming network to take off.

A decentralized streaming network is technically infeasible with the current Internet. Keep in mind that every watcher adds upload bandwidth requirements to a node somewhere else in the network. Consumer network connections are too asymmetric for that.

I have streamed live sports events using p2p for years and it works just fine.

Got a write up or demo? Pure curiosity of how it works

Nope, I have nothing. The most popular thing out there is Acestream, which is a weird Russian fork of VLC that is probably spyware but it "just works". It's closed source and I have never seen anything written as to how it works, sadly.

My point was along the lines of, p2p streaming is feasible with current infrastructure because it already works under those less than ideal conditions

No worries, I wasn't trying to call you out or anything it just sounded cool :)

We needed to ban asymmetric internet connections and IPv4 only.

Almost every streamer will have twitter/instagram because it's near impossible to get sponsorships/brand deals without them.

I'm in my 20s and know many gamers in their 20s/teens and we all avoid facebook like the plague. There's no chance.

You realize your anecdotal circle of friends is really not relevant in the grand scheme of things?

For serious scientific studies, anecdotal data is not useful.

For product fit, the experiences and feedback from your target audience are _extremely_ "relevant in the grand scheme of things." If your target audience is saying "I literally don't know anyone who would want to use this," yeah, that's relevant.

Unless you're aiming to imply that me and my friend group and greater gaming community are the exception and in fact the majority of young people use facebook, in which case....lol.

My "anecdotal experience" is interacting with dozens of gaming communities which mysteriously all link to subreddits and discords and twitches and never, ever a facebook group. That's not very anecdotal when these are communities of tens and hundreds of thousands of people.

> For serious scientific studies, anecdotal data is not useful.

This is still wrong; anecdotal data is what motivates studies in the first place.

What anecdotal data isn't is a conclusion.

Good point!

Unless you're aiming to imply that me and my friend group and greater gaming community are the exception and in fact the majority of young people use facebook, in which case....lol.

Have you done a statistically relevant survey of what the “majority of young people do”?

As a reference, if you go to r/cscareerquestions you would swear that no other company exists for graduating software engineers but the big 5 tech companies and if you don’t spend every minute “learning LeetCode to work for a FAANG” your life is over and you might as well kill yourself.

But it's what it is. Most people active on Facebook 10 to 5 years are not active anymore, and young people avoid it. If Facebook wants to attract young gamers, they will need a new brand for their gaming platform.

I can affirm that everyone under 20 I know also strongly dislikes Facebook.

They are all on Instagram though...

No we have two pieces of anecdote on HN....

I'm not sure what your point is.

Yes, these are anecdotes. If you have references that show Facebook is popular with young demographics I'd love to see links and discuss them.

Otherwise these anecdotal data points are useful. While not representative, it gives some ideas about mindset.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about...

"Around eight-in-ten (79%) of those ages 18 to 29 use Facebook". Anecdotally, I know a number of people who 1) say they hate Facebook 2) say they never use it 3) show up in my feed at least once a week for the last month.

I think there's an under-reporting problem here, where there's a stigma associated with using Facebook (it's for old people!) yet younger people still use it a lot. Note that this doesn't bode well for launching a service aimed at people in their 20s. Even though they're the most common demographic, they might not want their peer group to know they're using it.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about...

Interesting, especially the data around teens.

I would have expected a big rise around 18-22 because a lot of college / University and other interest group activity is there, and there are more varied friend groups and family to keep up with.

The 4th survey for 13-17 year olds with 50% is somewhat surprising for me though.

Here are some interesting stats

The average gamer is 34 years old 70% of gamers are age 18 or older

Considering FB has between 2.5 and 3 billion users. FB has much more chances of success considering its size, its user base, its built in advertising platform, its global reach, etc. Streaming and gaming isn't just about 12-18 year old gamers. If you're thinking monetization, there's not a whole lot to gain there for the majority of steamers. Not a whole lot of 12 year olds can support streamers financially. So sure, maybe it won't be the platform of choice for the 16 year olds, but doesn't mean it can't be dwarfed in size by the rest of the demographics who are also into gaming.

Don't forget, gamers of yesterday who started with the earliest consoles or who got on board anywhere between atari, NES, SNES, Sega, PS1, PS2, or PC gamers, are still gamers today.

I agree. For me, the core problem with facebook gaming is that I'm not going to interact with a gaming stream while I'm logged into my facebook account. I use my FB account to connect with family, and it works great for that, and that's it. Using it for anything else just inevitably leads to messy information leakage.

> you can't just steal away a successful business by throwing money at the problem and copying it. Look at zune, look at tidal, look at google+, look at bing, look at mixer.

Look at instagram stories?

You can steal features. You can't steal an entire platform + userbase.

Sure. Look at Google (Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos), look at Messenger (AIM, ICQ), look at GMail (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail), look at Facebook (Myspace), etc...

You absolutely CAN steal a userbase if the quality of your product is sufficiently better than the existing alternative. The problem with Mixer is that the only real advantage they had was latency, and that's not a big enough reason to draw people to the platform.

Facebook's current problem is that they want to use their existing network and one of the primary features of a gaming platform is anonymity. 99% of the streamers on twitch can't be identified by anything but their usernames, and that's the way they like it. Facebook is antithetical to that experience.

The examples you give are simply not comparable. In all three cases, this was not someone throwing a ton of money at something and copying it to try to steal it.

Google was made by two grad students who came up with a better way of searching. They invented a superior product and it took off on its own merits.

Gmail was largely created by one person helming the project on his own, and again it took off because it was VASTLY better than existing options. I was a Gmail beta user-- I remember! It wasn't even close.

Facebook, again-- not a corporation throwing a ton of money at something. It took off on its own, exactly as depicted in The Social Network. It was made by a handful of college students and people simply loved using it in the beginning.

Given your examples, you see to have misunderstood me as arguing that a successful product can never be replaced or lose its dominance. Of course I am not saying that, that would be crazy. I am saying a corporation or any other entity with a lot of money cannot replace a successful product using that money. They can only do it by actually coming up with a better solution to the problem, and that almost never happens-- they simply aren't able to do such a thing in most cases.

Instead they deliver hollow, branded imitations like the many examples I named, and they fail.

MS already did that by paying Ninja ~30M to stream on mixer originally. He averaged like 2K viewers. They did the same with shroud with the same result. Now Ninja and shroud are supposedly being paid out in full for their contracts and are free to sign with any platform.

Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.

Sorry just to clarify, thirty million US dollars? Like...the currency used in America?

Yes.

The current rumor is that FB offered to double the Mixer contracts for Shroud and Ninja as well, and that both turned them down. Not sure how accurate said rumors are.

I guess I don't understand as it has been already proven in the marketplace that Shroud and Ninja can't attract new viewers so why would anyone overpay for their services? The only streamer that I could imagine that could drag viewers away from Twitch would be DrDisrespect but he recently signed a multi-year deal with Twitch.

The free prime sub is a huge deal not a lot of people are talking about. Also a huge portion of twitch subs comes from whales dropping blocks of gifted subscriptions.. especially the bigger streamers. They've gamified ePanhandling and they're falling for it

No idea where the confusion comes from, but yeah, it was at least 30 million USD.

between $20 and $30 million, according to this https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/26/tech/video-game-streaming...

I really don't understand this confusion about the ridiculous amount of money in gaming. Sony is projecting $20 Billion in revenue this FY. Nintendo is projecting 10, with no new console launch. There are multiple game developers who make billions of dollars every year.

Gaming is the most profitable and highest revenue part of the entertainment industry, and it's not even especially close.

Prime time viewership of ABC (as in the entire television network, at peak times) was 5.5 million viewers last quarter [1].

Ninja's had 4.4 million viewers of a single stream on Mixer. That's just one guy in a chair with an almost zero content cost.

$30 Million doesn't seem that crazy compared to the total cost to produce a year's worth of prime-time content.

[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/351645/prime-....

[2]

> Why offer them a second massive truckload of money when the first truckload fundamentally did not work.

Except Facebook did that. Rumors go Facebook offered them double their Deal from Mixer, but they declined. Though, others did take it. Facebook is bar far not as worse as Mixer for a streamer. If you have the matching games, you can be happy there.

> One word why I think this will work out well: money.

This is indeed usually the strategy.

What people seem to forget though, is that Mixer is not the first streaming competitor that thought of the idea of "just pay streamers a bunch of money, and hope the viewers follow".

Although, in some sense, this does work, there is a long graveyard of failed attempts.

It is a bit of a winners curse. A platform can always just pay people a bunch of money to join their platform. That is the easy part. The hard part is actually making back the money that you spent on those creators.

And the reality is that none of the attempts to just buy out streamers, by vast over paying for them, has ever worked, for the long term.

Eventually the money spigots dry up, and the people spending the money start to wonder when they are actually going to make back on their investment (hint: the answer is never).

The problem most companies have with this approach is that they stop short of total war.

If you wanted to pay streamers to defect to your platform, then don't cheap out and try to pay a few of them.

Pay all of them. As much as it takes. And blacklist the ones who turn down your initial offers.

WCW vs WWF is illustrative.

You can't win while a rival platform remains viable. And they remain viable as long as they can fund themselves.

So either you play to drive your opponent out of business, or don't play at all.

Although I agree with you that this strategy might work in a duopoly type situation, where there are two platforms competing against each other, in a borderline zero sum game.

The problem, though, is in markets where there are more than two participants.

What happens when Mixer does this strategy, as well as Facebook gaming, as well as youtube gaming? Answer: the costs shoot up into the stratephere, and all of them go bankrupt.

It is kind of like a game of chicken. Massively overbidding to buy out the entire market only works if there aren't other people out there who are willing to meet you at the same level of irrationality, and burn the whole thing to the ground, along with you.

IMO, the only real workable strategy, similar to this, would be if those are smaller platforms, agree to do some sort of team up (which is sorta what is happening with FB gaming and mixer), so that the irrational actors don't all lose the game of chicken.

There's probably a place for streaming sites that cater to very very specific content. NSFW is the obvious one, but I imagine you could try to serve one narrow nice extremely well, like auto racing, speed runners, live coders, baking, whatever. Become known to that community and offer features that mainstream streaming sites don't want to provide because it doesn't make sense for everybody.

Nit: Facebook has dark mode

Reply on news.ycombinator.com