Twitch and Gaming: Streamers are becoming the Lifeline of Games

Twitch has solidified its place as a gamer’s household name recently, and maybe it has earned it. Good or bad, Twitch has incredible influence over games today. It revives interest in old games, influences the narrative on what goes in games, such as streamer mode, and even makes or breaks a new game's success. So let's talk a little more about how Twitch affects the way you game and games in general.

Twitch’s growth has changed the way gamers consume games. Smaller games are getting marketing access to large markets for little to no cost, and it's pretty amazing. Games like Among Us are an example of previously released games that later blew up, a common occurrence on Twitch because of its effective audience reach. The list of games whose careers were helped by Twitch is long. We have Rocket League, Fall Guys, and even World of Warcraft which has gotten its millionth audience boost on Twitch last year from their well anticipated expansion packs releases.

Marketing Made Easy

Success with little friction is becoming more and more accessible for budding gaming studios, but at what cost? Twitch streamers and YouTubers have become big players in videogame marketing to the point some devs would say it can make or break a game's' first impression on the audience. We see this relationship rapidly become more commercialised. Games are paying big money to some streamers to play their games live, which is affecting the evolution of the game industry. When you look at what this partnership is doing to games, it's incredible, but there are reasons to be wary.

Streamer Mode

Let's take a look at streamer modes, for example. So for those who don't know exactly what it means when a streamer gets hit with a DMCA, it basically means the streamer has used copyrighted music on their stream without permission from the artist. As simple as the crime sounds, this is actually a very tedious rule to abide too. For instance, a lot of in-game music for big games are most likely copyrighted. So recent games, including Cyberpunk, have adapted and started implementing streamer modes, where the use of copyrighted music can be opted out amongst other options that make streaming games Twitch friendly. The fact that Twitch has influenced games to include streamer friendly modes is a pretty cool development but could lead to conflicts down the road. Twitch hasn't been the best with dealing with DMCA and their streamers' frustrations with it. Communication has been poor, and they even wiped a large number of past clips to their streamers dismay due to the copyrighted music later being found.

Let's See Where This Goes

Twitch has become a critical factor in a game's development and life cycle with streamer modes and its massive marketing capabilities. In fact, as I type now, the Twitch community has since moved from the Among Us wave and now has resurrected once again the survival game Rust through entertaining streamer only servers with big-name streamers like XQC and the Offline TV (OTV) crew. So let's keep an eye on Twitch, watch where it takes our favourite games, and see how they shape the games of the future.