I know I'm probably late to the party but I'd say over the last year I started getting into more watching professional gamers and wanted to get a sense of what the feeling on that type of thing was. I have a lot of gamer friends and it seems kind of mixed, some say it's stupid to watch other people play video games when you could play them yourself and others (like myself) enjoy it because you might see some awesome games you wouldn't otherwise see and get to see people with skill far surpassing your own. This definitely seems to be a growing trend. For example: -Pewdiepie is the most subscribed to and watched channel on YouTube and reportedly makes millions of dollars a year for what is essentially him playing video games and making stupid commentary (I like the guy but that's basically what he does) -Pewds isn't the only YouTube gamer who gets a lot of views, you've got people like Markiplier, Captain Sparklez, piles of Minecraft players, etc. -Twitch is gaining a lot of popularity even being factored in to the PS4/XB1 consoles. Some streams get tens of thousands of views at a given moment. -MLG tournaments keep growing in money value and size of people watching The biggest example in my mind is the recent DOTA2 International which featured a prize pool of almost $11mil with the winners getting over $5mil (team of 5 so over $1mil each). I don't even know how many viewers were watching the twitch streams but it had to have been in the hundreds of thousands and was even picked up by ESPN2 or 3 or something. I know ESPN shows literally any type of contest and there isn't much in the way of sports happening right now other than baseball but that's still pretty insane. For me personally I've never played a game of DOTA or LoL in my life but absolutely loved watching this tournament. Anyway, do any of you watch any of this type of thing? Are you aware of it? I can tell you I watch a little bit of all of these things and find it highly entertaining, especially the COD or DOTA tournaments and the Star Craft ones are okay too but I didn't play SC2 that much.
It's the reason why Google bought twitch tv for a billion dollars. Who would of thought such a thing could happen years ago? That Justin tv guy is set for life. I personally do watch because at times it is entertaining and laugh at the real time sports like commentary during the gameplay.
Yeah I heard about Google buying it, I think that was a smart move because it seems like an ever expanding area of entertainment. Hell last night I had like an hour to kill and could have played a game myself, read, watched TV or any number of other time wasters but what did I do: flipped between watching some dude play DOTA and a cute girl play Hearthstone (sidenote: fairly attractive gamer girls will probably also help increase viewership).
Meh, I don't have strong feelings about it. Some people get audiences for their big personalities, or looks- and others get audiences because they're really good at whatever video game. It's not a really useful skill, playing video games, but some people can monetize it for at least a little while. In the long run I don't think very many people can make a stable "career" out of people watching them play video games. I think the thing that bothers folks is that while video games can be art, playing them often is not. You're watching someone interact with someone else's creative work, and in that sense it can feel derivative or unoriginal. On the other hand, there are people who can then use it as a jumping off point to their own creative work, like the "Angry Video Game Nerd", who created a whole persona and schtick where he complains about the flaws in video games that mostly came out 20 - 30 years ago. As far as "watch me play this first person shooter" videos, folks can watch what they want, but I personally don't find that to be interesting.
Yeah I'm into it. I've played LoL from the begining. I watch the twitch streams for LoL when I have the time.
Haven't played LoL yet but I will at sometime. I watch the streams sometimes. Last night the top 6 games being viewed had about 165K viewers. Pretty crazy IMO.
