What surprised Shear and the team at Twitch is that people don't become subscribers to get rid of ads. Subscribers can sometimes talk to everyone watching the stream instead of just typing in messages, and they get a newsletter and badge next to their name in the chat room. The Munkels make money by getting a cut of the advertising revenue, and what viewers pay to become subscribers, usually $5 a month. For instance, they sing a song every time they get five new subscribers one of their viewers thought the song could be better, and sent them cymbals and bongo drums. box, and they've been receiving fan mail and gifts. Munkel and his father recently got a P.O. but they'll watch because of the streamer, not so much the gameplay."Īnd some of their streamers are loyal fans. "It wasn't so much, 'You come in and watch us play.' It was, 'You come in, you hang out, you relax, you talk to the other people, you talk to us, we talk back to you,' " he says. Jason Munkel of the father-son duo says talking to the people watching matters more to him than the game. Shear compares it to TV, only the difference is that the people on the screen will talk back to you. "We sort of brought that living room experience to the Internet." " can be a stadium, or it can be a living room," he says. "I think the analogy to understand it is basically like sports: I love playing basketball it doesn't mean I don't enjoy watching the NBA."īut the other is the same reason that gamers will hang out with each other in the living room and pass a controller around, Shear says. "It's compelling to watch anyone at the pinnacle of human achievement," Shear says. One is that people want to learn from and marvel at the best gamers in the world.
#Starcraft 2 game advertizing in chat movie
Some say the video game industry is worth more than movie box office revenue.Ī lot of people are watching other people play video games online, but why?Įmmett Shear, one of the founders of Twitch, says there are basically two things that draw people to the site. Lionsgate Films recently partnered with Twitch and Major League Gaming to sponsor a StarCraft II tournament to promote the DVD and home video release of the film Ender's Game - the first time a Hollywood studio has sponsored a gaming contest. puts Twitch ahead of Hulu, Valve and Amazon, behind just Netflix, Google and Apple. A recent graph of the peak Internet traffic in the U.S. The Twitch 2013 report notes that the average viewer is 21 years old and watches 106 minutes per day. The site now attracts more than 45 million viewers worldwide every month, with more than a million people streaming their games. The Munkels stream their games on a site called Twitch, which has also grown in the 2 1/2 years since it was founded. To promote the DVD and home media release of Ender's Game, a movie about fighting aliens, Lionsgate Films decided to sponsor a tournament for StarCraft II, a space strategy game where players can fight as or against aliens.