With More Than 20M Gamers Tuning In, Twitch Raises $15M

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/19/twitch-15m-bessemer-venture-partners/

by Dobbs • 14 years ago

53 49 14 years ago

davidbrent• 14 years ago

Twitch is a great product and their app on android has come a long way. It is amazing that I can watch someone play my favorite game at 720p on my phone.

dageshi3• 14 years ago

My personal opinion is that video game playthoughs are probably going to be incredibly disruptive to TV & Radio. In terms of cheap but good quality entertainment very little else can compete.

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

Really? Maybe for a certain niche.

Watching someone else play a videogame is much more boring than just playing the game for myself.

It's sometimes fun to watch "let's play" of very old games for the nostalgia, but I really don't imagine families sitting around for a screening of a GTA playthrough.

EDIT: I'm aware that e-sports and "let's play" videos are popular with certain demographics. My argument is that this doesn't really constitute "disruption". Not many people are going to throw out their HBO subscription and substitute it for videos of people playing minecraft.

oinksoft• 14 years ago

For the sake of discussion, have you watched somebody play a game that you are familiar with, at the highest level? Speed-running (trying to break unofficial records for beating a game, fulfilling certain other conditions as well usually) is quite a bit of fun to watch as an act of phsyical and mental prowess, not unlike juggling or other stunts.

loxs• 14 years ago

Not true. Especially for games that require skill. For me it's extremely interesting to watch League of Legends pro players. They invent new strategies and create trends like popular champions to play with. I would argue that LoL is (much) more interesting to watch than Football (be it American or "real" football), Basketball X-ball, Formula 1 or you name it competitive "real" sport.

Pkeod• 14 years ago

People can only spend their limited time in only so many ways. Let's Plays dominate the front page of YouTube every day, with many videos getting 1m+ views in a few days only. Many people doing it are really entertaining and funny.

YOGSCAST has 2.4m subscribers. Wait until all of the kids watching LPs now grow up, have their own kids, raise them on the same stuff they enjoyed, and then sit around to watch and listen to their favorites.

Ronwe• 14 years ago

Ofc, it is always fun to play it, but you are not watching just anyone that plays a game, but the best there are in it. It's always interesting to watch how the "pros" do it, even for a little while. It's not that different than watching sports... And not every game will be popular, just like not every sport is, but no one can't deny that a game like league of legends is not getting hugely popular, and tournament prizes are going insane. It's just that for now most people still see games as something you do "just for fun" not something you can live ofo, but that is changing as we see in this example.

ngokevin• 14 years ago

It's a lot easier to casually open up a stream of a LP in a browser tab, than to stop what you're doing, head to the couch, and commit yourself to an hour of video games. When you're playing a game you have to focus, when watching you can just tune in whenever like when tests are running.

muhfuhkuh3• 14 years ago

On the contrary, there are companies blossoming based on people doing "let's play". Youtube is filled with partners making incredible amounts of money doing "let's play" videos and frag highlight reels with dramatic music and editing. Any random video garners between 500,000 and 1 million hits within days of uploading them. They become viral instantly. And, their subscriber lists hover in the millions, every one of them sitting through both pre-fill ads and sometimes interstitials (for 2+ hour playthroughs with commentary).

This market is not niche. It rivals cable TV shows in reach. And, demographically? Forget about it. They are the youngest and money-spendiest one out there. MTV wishes they could pull Machinima demographic numbers per piece of content (and for the price of content, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than the Situation and Snooki, that's for sure).

dageshi3• 14 years ago

You're missing the magic ingredient which is the personality of the person playing the game. Don't think of it as a "play through" only but rather playthough talk radio.

http://www.youtube.com/uberhaxornova 1.1M Subscribers, 650 million video views

http://www.youtube.com/ssohpkc 660K Subscribers 380 million video views

www.youtube.com/user/TheSyndicateProject 1.3M Subscribers 500M video views

Which is pretty impressive bearing in mind most of those channels haven't really been around that long, 2-3 years probably. But these guys are making a lot of money through ads and they're all pretty young, oldest is probably 24-25 of the three I just linked. Which is important because I think their audience is mainly in the mid to late teens although I don't know for sure.

mej10• 14 years ago

A lot of people would rather watch experts play a sport than play it themselves. I have met quite a few people that sort of gave up on being good at Starcraft 2 and instead watch the experts play it.

Watching experts execute highly trained strategic and tactical skills in real time is fun for a lot of people.

bradleyland• 14 years ago

And yet millions of people tune in to watch two groups of men kick, throw, and fumble an oblong ball back and forth down a 100 yard field every Sunday (in the US). They're not playing, so why tune in?

I've not spent a lot of time with Twitch, but what I've discovered is that it's not always about the games. There are personalities developing. Certain players are more enjoyable to watch, because of the way they engage the viewer. With team-based competition games, it can be a lot of fun to listen to players try to work together, and experience the, often hilarious, mishaps that occur during a competition. In other cases, it's just fun to watch someone perform at a level that deserves appreciation.

People like to watch other people. It's in our nature. Gaming has become increasingly social, so I don't find it at all surprising that gaming as a spectator sport is taking off.

xenophanes2• 14 years ago

Watching someone else play has some large advantages over playing yourself.

1) he has more skill at the game than you

2) he can put in the hours to get gear, friends to join his party, and other resources you don't have that let him do things you couldn't do

3) playing alone can be lonely. a streamer talking about the game provides some discussion about it. and streamers can be on audio chat with their friends, so you can be listening to a discussion between several people while they are playing. whereas if you play yourself maybe you don't have several friends at the same place in the game chatting with you about what you're doing

4) you can watch a stream on a computer that can't play the game

5) save money on buying the game (I often watch some gameplay footage of games i don't have to see if i'd like to play them or not)

So for example I watch http://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp sometimes. He is in a WoW guild that I couldn't get accepted in, doing things in WoW I couldn't do. I want to see what high end WoW is like but I don't want to spend a year to catch up. So it's great to get a taste of gameplay that has a very high barrier to entry. I also save the $15/month for a WoW sub.

And for what it's worth, I bought guildwars 2 because of Kripp (for $60). It was fun to play the game while having his stream on. Why not do both in some cases!? I got tips from his stream and understood what he was doing better because I was doing similar things.

pclark2• 14 years ago

e-sports are akin to fencing or sailing. they are fantastic sports if you have participated or researched them, and if you do not, they are utterly baffling -- to solve this problem you have to invest very very heavily in the user experience for the audience. having engaging commentators is only a small percentage of the problem.

america's cup even has the benefit of being reasonably cool at a high level: 70ft yachts travelling at 50 knots that might flip over and kill people at any moment. fencing has, well, swords. i have never met anyone else that understands nor follows these two sports.

i remain curious as to what e-sports has that make people think they would ever be mainstream.

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

It's more interesting to watch pretty much any sport if you have participated in it at some point.

I guess this is why soccer more popular than sailing. Most people have kicked a ball around with their friends before but wouldn't have access to a yacht.

With F1 for example , plenty of people have driven a car and probably at least wanted to drive it fast, F1 is basically that desire taken to it's logical conclusion.

With e-sports, the barrier to entry for picking up a games console or PC with some games on is pretty low. What will be interesting though is to see which games dominate.

FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.

pwf• 14 years ago

Not many kids grew up sailing. Most kids these days have a fair bit of experience with video games, first person shooters especially. They might not get the subtleties of some of the 'pro' level FPS games, but I think they would be able to spectate. Games like Starcraft and DotA pretty much require that you play the game regularly to appreciate them though.

Then again, the rules to football are fairly complex depending on how deeply you're concerned about player formations and stats, yet it's wildly popular. Starcraft can be simplified to 'blow up all their stuff' just like football can be simplified to 'get the ball in the endzone'.

prawks2• 14 years ago

E-sports really are an interesting space.

International tournaments with $1+ million grand prizes are nothing to shug at. Couple that with the fact that anyone can play anyone else in the world practically instantaneously and that more and more people are playing video games recreationally every day.

They might not be the Premier League or the NFL, but South Korean Starcraft is certainly not far off.

niekmaas• 14 years ago

I've heard that argument about Korea ever since I started following and working in eSports (around 2004ish). Yet, I'm still waiting on that big breakthrough in the USA/Europe. I'm afraid it will still take quite some time.

markatto• 14 years ago

League of Legends may well be that big breakthrough - major events draw more viewers than an average MLB game.

ilcavero• 14 years ago

I have been checking out twitch more and more lately (big time waster) and noticed that it's a strong magnet for creating communities around specifics streams. Not only big time e-sports are attractive, regular dudes playing some games might be the biggest attraction in the end.

trafficlight• 14 years ago

Absolutely. I follow Starcraft 2 primarily, and I make it a point to tune into Day9's show. Lately he's been averaging 6,000 simultaneous viewers for one show. That's not as impressive as the 100k views that watched the WCS European Finals this weekend, but it's lot more consistent.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

I've had a little professional contact with the Twitch guys, and they're all really cool (as well as having an excellent product). I think they have a lot of things about their service they could improve, but they certainly aren't sitting idly by.

jasonwilk• 14 years ago

Great product. Great team. The fact that these guys are not reliant on YouTube makes it that much more attractive.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

Yo e-sports aaaAAAaaa!!!

- Arturo NYCFurby Sanchez, twitch caster extraordinaire

gondo• 14 years ago

i was just wondering if any of those "company X raised $Y" articles does actually ever mentioned how much shares were given away. was it 10%, 50%, 80% of the company?

With More Than 20M Gamers Tuning In, Twitch Raises $15M

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