ΤΟ ΣΤΟΙΧΗΜΑ ΤΟΥ 1 ΔΙΣ ΔΟΛ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ GOOGLE …
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity. Like a musical instrument, a video game requires a player: without input, a game is inert. The rise in popularity of Twitch, a Web service that offers access to an array of live video streams, seems curious, then. While it can be used to broadcast anything from a live concert to a poetry reading, Twitch reports that ninety-nine per cent of its visitors use the site to watch others play video games. Sometimes that footage comes from the console of a teen-ager playing at home; other times, it comes from a video-game-tournament final, those stentorian live-sports-style events increasingly held in large arenas. Twitch’s popularity has drawn the attention of Google, the Internet’s Eye of Sauron. Earlier today, according to anonymous sources, the search giant acquired Twitch for the sum of one billion dollars.
This may seem like an overvaluation of a site that’s known mostly to the cognoscenti. But Twitch’s analytics suggest otherwise. Last year, it reported an average of forty-five million viewers per month, making it the largest site of its kind on the Internet by a sizeable margin. It accounted for forty-three per cent of all live-streaming Web traffic by volume, exceeding that of ESPN, W.W.E., and MLB.com combined. Its audience consists primarily of teen-agers, and they are highly engaged: in 2013, fifty per cent of users spent more than twenty hours per week on the site, an average of a hundred and six minutes per day for each user.
The reasons for Twitch’s success are difficult to apprehend. Certainly it’s the latest beneficiary of the seismic shifts now taking place in the broadcasting landscape. In the past five years, the rise of video-streaming sites has made Internet stars of many young casters, as the contributors to such sites call themselves. Felix Kjellberg, a twenty-four-year-old Swedish man known online by the alias PewDiePie, has more than twenty-eight million Twitch subscribers, an audience that rivals that of America’s slick-haired talk-show hosts. According to Business Insider, PewDiePie earns between $140,000 and $1.4 million per month from advertisements alone. The stars of Twitch share some of the attributes that propelled TV stars to fame in decades past. They are likeable, watchable, humorous, insightful. The difference is the subject matter: the biggest stars, almost without exception, discuss video games.
Why this, of all the potential areas of interest? Perhaps it’s because young people can’t afford to buy many of the games that they covet, so they settle for experiencing them by proxy. This explanation doesn’t quite ring true, though, since many Twitch stars play games that are available for free (among them League of Legends, arguably the most-played video game in the world today, with thirty-two million monthly active users). Perhaps, then, it’s a way to bring social interaction and the human touch into a solitary, at times almost onanistic, pursuit. Playing a video game by oneself can, like working through a crossword puzzle, be an enjoyable mental or manual challenge. But sharing that challenge with others brings a different sort of enjoyment, a social element that even the most solitary-minded human is drawn to.
Then there’s the sporting aspect of the medium. Video games can be like musical instruments, but they are also very often like sports, offering their players constant appraisal in the form of words or numbers. The pursuit of glory through public competition has always been a part of the video game’s DNA: think back to the crowds who would gather around arcade cabinets to watch a particularly skilled player.
The same is true today: spectators gather online to watch particularly talented players showboat on Twitch. To quote David Foster Wallace, “Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.” That data has never been so clearly presented as in the mathematical bounds of the video game, where every shot on goal can be viewed in slow motion, from every possible angle.
The medium is diverging. On the one side there are the sorts of video games that curve toward Hollywood’s example: they present cinematic story lines and employ filmic techniques to create a drama in which the player is the protagonist. Then there are the more plainly sport-like video games, which have been meticulously designed to allow for fairness and competitive team play. This latter kind of game is in ascension. Just last week, the fourth international world championship for the video game Defense of the Ancients 2 was held at Seattle’s Key Arena; the total prize pool reached more than ten million dollars. Millions viewed the games as they were played out online.
Twitch serves both kinds of video-game experience. Would-be casters can play cinematic-style games and offer their commentary, their wisecracks and keen observations, to a live audience. Likewise, Twitch broadcasts the live finals of professional-level e-sports games, much as ESPN broadcasts the World Series (though in fact ESPN also delivered a broadcast of the Defense of the Ancients 2 tournament).
For Google, Twitch complements its acquisition, in 2006, of YouTube: one platform caters to live footage, the other to pre-recorded. The company now owns the predominant video services that are used to capture humanity’s past and present on the Web. Only the future is missing.
Simon Parkin
