Gamers are spending more time watching videos about gaming on YouTube and Twitch than playing games themselves.
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Sometimes watching someone play a game is more fun than playing the game. Markiplier shrieking his way through Subnautica was fucking hilarious. And I have a friend who doesn’t play games but who watched an entire playthrough of Detroit: Become Human because they loved the story.
That’s me for sure these days. Back in high school I used to play at least a couple of hours every day. I have a gaming PC and a Steam Deck but probably play a few hours a month. But I’ll happily watch several hours of Twitch each day while I’m relaxing.
Probably just getting older and busier, haha.
As a (probably) even older guy I find it the weirdest thing ever. “watching games being played”. It’s boring AF.
Sure, I can’t t play counterstrike effectively anymore. Sure I am the one with the most deaths in helldivers2. Doom eternal is just way too twitchy for me. I’ve become too slow. In mechwarrior 5 I have too put the difficulty on story/easy and aim assist on. Which hurt my old ego the most to be honest.
But doing it still beats the shit out of watching it.
/start_old_man_rant
Especially these days when every streamer is an egocentric manchilds screaming their head off in a totally scripted “episode”. Or girls in bikinis only because it sells. Can we just leave that in hooters? And everything is bought and paid for. You’re watching a commercial. Or do you really think that logo on his mike just happens to be in view? Or the brand of the gaming chair?or that cupboard behind him filled with lights and gaming gear? Its ultra consumerism. And the begging for money. Fuck off. Really.
I hate it.
I miss total biscuit. That was entertainment.
/end_old_man_rant
I mean, the thing that people watch twitch for is mainly the person/people on the stream, the game is a backdrop, rarely the actual focus
And not everyone is ego-centric like you’re saying? I mean, there’s literally tens of thousands of streamers. Don’t just look at the biggest ones that probably mainly appeal to kids, i.e. a different audience than you. Chances are the kind of people you would enjoy watching are just smaller and more niche
Lmao, what a takeaway. Guy is struggling to earn that paycheck.
Reminds me of the business plans of the business guys from Ready Player One. “We estimate we can sell up to 80 percent of a user’s visual field before inducing seizures.” 😂
Sometimes you are so tired that you can’t actively engage in something, but you want to engage with it so you passively engage instead.
This goes for gamers watching gaming videos, woodworkers watching woodworking videos or people with dirty houses watching lawnmowing/pressure washing/car detailing/rug cleaning videos.
You get some of the endorphins of achievement, without having to go through the effort of achieving something.
You don’t really know it until you stop watching videos for like a week. Suddenly you want to do your favorite things again; try things yourself again.
New report claims people with hobby spend more time watching videos about hobby than doing hobby
Watching someone cut a dovetail by hand is a lot more interesting now that I know from experience how hard it is. And maybe I’ll learn a trick to make my next ones better.
And its cheaper to watch someone do it. Quality timber and tools are expensive.
And less annoying to your neighbor if you’re in a neighborhood. Plus how many tables can you actually fit in a house?
Cutting dovetails implies by hand - power tools exist for it, but those using power tools generally use different joints.
My neighbor does not make dovetails, then.
I’m not surprised. They are very hard to make correctly and not that much better than other options that are easier to do. they are a “holy grail” of wood working skill for a reason. I’ve done a dozen in my life and the best is so awful I want to burn an otherwise nice creation to hide the evidence.
Dovetail sounds like a bird. It’s not a bird, right? Right?
😏
A dovetail is a type of joint that doesn’t require fasteners and only uses the material (usually glue for wood).
It was more funny when I didn’t know that :(
But thanks! I kind of expected it’s something like that :D
Does knowing that the name comes from one of the join elements (left side) looking like the tail of a dove, improve that?
I use one of those big metal paper choppers to cut doves tails.
If I want to do my hobby, I need to make time for it, whereas if I want to watch videos about my hobby, I can do it on the toilet. It turns out it’s a lot easier to watch than make time for a hobby, hence why I do more of it.
If I didn’t have to work, I’d spend more time doing my hobby. But I do, and I have kids, so hobby time is quite limited.
Execution is a small part of “the planning”, man. That ain’t even fair.
imagine if this was about football fans
The interesting part to me is that you can watch football even when/if you can’t play football, but you could be gaming instead of watching.
Watching sports is a useful activity when you confined to a hospital bed for a month or two as has happened to people I know. In one case they wouldn’t be allowed to game, even sports were in danger of being too exciting for their condition.
Nah, I can’t game while I’m doing the dishes but I can watch a video just fine
You’re taking too long to do the dishes.
There are more chores than dishes:
That’s when I watch/listen to streamers, I almost never do it when I could otherwise be gaming. I’ll occasionally listen/watch while gaming though.
Obligatory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
I feel this so much sometimes…
I don’t only do dishes. Also, there are short videos.
Logic does not check out. Like they’re both activities I can do on my couch? Okay sure, I guess. Just like I can watch a video about knitting even if I can’t knit, but I could be knitting instead of watching!? Complete nonsense…
I can only watch so much football as can a rare other people like me. If I am watching football I want the view of one position. I don’t care that the quarterback got sacked on the play, how did the running back avoid the defense in his attempts to become open for a pass - or some such that I want to emulate when I next play. (i think that is a likely thing - I consider football too dangerous to play so I’m guessing - in reality I’d prefer to see other sports that I’m likely to play)
edit: spelling
That’s a fascinating way to spell… Presumably “quarterback”?
i can’t make heads or tails of this reply :P
“how did the running back avoid the defense”, i’m assuming there should be a “to” in there? who runs back? i can’t parse it…
They went with American football, where “running back” and ”defense” refer to positions.
…huh.
The game most of the world calls “football” is called “soccer” in the US. We have a very popular game we call “football” in the US that is unrelated to “soccer”, instead it is related to rugby (still very different from rugby, but there is a relation)
strange
Welcome to the world. There are strange things all over. Sit back and enjoy laughing at the ride.
Those aren’t gamers in the same way watching racing doesn’t make me a race car driver.
Just because someone doesn’t play games all the time doesn’t mean they don’t play games sometimes.
If you race 10 hours a week, but you watch racing 20 hours a week, are you not still a racer?
Fair point
Plenty of people have a twitch stream open whilst playing a game.
Weird! 🤷♂️ Do they watch the twitch stream when their game is loading?
It’s like having the tv or radio on whilst doing something else.
No, they stare at both monitors simultaneously like a Chameleon.
“She’s got Marty Feldman eyesss”
Hi, I’m plenty of people
What’s your mom?
Wouldn’t be me. I don’t like streams. When I’ve had twitch drops i wanted to claim I’d just mute the tab in the background to get the time limit needed.
I don’t have the attention span for streamers. It’s like golf. Might be fun to play but watching is another matter.
I usually open streams on a second monitor while playing, unless the game demands my full undivided attention for extended periods of time. It’s more of a case by case basis for me.
I did the same when I was playing WoW a long time ago, watching stuff while doing mining routes and whatnot. But to be fair, I was doing it because the game itself was a drudgery that I got skinnerboxed into playing and pretending I was enjoying.
So I ask this to you: is the game you are playing not entertaining enough, that you have to watch something with it in order to feel entertained? If so, why not play something else that captures your whole attention? It’s your time, shouldn’t you be spending it with things you actually enjoy?
The answer is I enjoy both games that capture my whole attention and games that allow me to watch something in the background. Sometimes I feel like doing the former and sometimes the latter
This, how people can find watching more entertaining than playing is beyond me. I tried watching people play my favourite games on twitch to see what it was like, I got bored out of my brains in minutes.
The closest I can do is watching gameplay videos on youtube, from people who do extremely creative things that inspire me for future playthroughs - but even then.
To y’all watching streams: I’m not judging you, you do you. I just don’t understand you.
I enjoy watching tournaments to see how much of skill difference there is between me, the one day a week gamer, and the pros who play every single day for 8-12 hours. It shows you what is possible and what the limit is.
Once I bought a game because I saw a pro playing it and thought it looked like fun. Boy, was I wrong. The gaming community is not just a shit-hole, it’s a toxic, radioactive bog of brain dead troglodytes caked in layers of fecal matter, impervious to reason or friendliness. Not only that, many multiplayer games have either no tutorial and you’re dropped into a war zone when you keep dying, all the while being screamed at by some dude with a supermarket mic that’s either in his asshole, mouth or 3 meters away on his console, with no possibility of reviewing what you did or a some kind of training chamber / level with bots to get better in peace and quiet.
Well, for example; I like to watch LeagueOfLegends streams but don’t like to play it anymore.
I’m 4 years clean from league and I still dream about it sometimes
all ex-league players who i’ve spoken with (myself included) refer to league of legends and breaking free from it as if they were raised in a cult or dealing with life-ruining substance abuse that still affects them to this day
For me, it’s audio in the background that I can interact with if I want.
Sometimes the people are funny too, but it’s not like my first monitor. Streams are a second monitor thing, with me doing something on the main. Reading, gaming, writing.
Also sometimes I’ll watch the various leagues to see people do games I’d hate to play do really really well at it.
I don’t watch streamers, but I’ll watch videos like ‘which is the best weapon for [X]’ or ‘how to optimize production in [X].’ I’ve watched stream highlights like SovietWomble’s bullshittery, or IAmCrusty’s psychopathic VR vids. Once you get stuff like that into your YouTube algorithm, there’s a lot of it. It’s gaming content you can consume when location or time constraints won’t let you actually game, and that’s a larger chunk of my day than when I can sit down and play.
You can’t have stream highlights without a stream. Even if no one watches the stream, the infrastructure and technologies have to be there. And I can see where some audience members of those highlights would be attracted to the raw stream, trying to catch the ‘good stuff’ live, the same way some people watch NASCAR hoping to see crashes as they happen.
I prefer to play, but I don’t have time to dedicate to it. I can listen/watch a game stream while working, on the toilet, or doing chores around the house. I can only play in the evenings and weekends, and only when my kids are otherwise occupied or in bed.
Yeah, watching is worse than playing, but it’s better than doing neither.
Yeah I’ve only ever found 1 game play chann on YouTube that I enjoy watching, Macie Jay who makes compilations of his stream for YouTube. He’s incredibly creative playing R6, it’s really fun to watch. But in general I don’t get watching someone play a game when I could just play it myself.
There’s retro streamers and smaller/older streamers that aren’t so hype and “ON IT” all the time.
Sometimes I just want to be around the community that surrounds a game I am enjoying. If I am playing a JRPG, I may spend more time in a JRPG discord going back and forth with users, or go find a streamer playing it and pick their brain a bit.
It helps you not feel so alone with the experience. You may be the only person for miles and miles to boot up Breath of Fire IV, but rest assured, someone out there wants to talk about it.
I mean they are counting e-sports? Because is the same shit as watching soccer but better, vast majority of soccer fans doesn’t play it regularly.
Those are rookie numbers
The long weekend from Thanksgiving gave me unprecedented access to factorio space age. I think I hit 60 hours last week.
And videos complaining about videogames.
Thank god we have YouTube videos that tell us what games to like and what games to hate. Imagine we would have to make this decision on our own.
Reviews have actually saved me money. Time is limited, so I’m thankful to be able toto watch a review and be able to use that to help me make a decision about a game I’m on the fence with.
Yeah, reviews can be really helpful of course.
Just have a friend who tells me the whole time what games are supposed to be bad because of wokness and stuff. He isn’t even interested in them in the first place, so it’s kind of annoying.
So I vented a bit, sorry.
Oh, you’re right about the wokeness thing. I really just look at a review for info about gameplay and plot quality.
It’s getting really fucking annoying to look at steam reviews and discussions and running across several “is it woke?” posts.
Often times, it will be “one black NPC in a historically white environment, one female in a combat position, it’s been ruined by wokeness.”
Or often “two non-essential NPCs are in a gay relationship, stay away” when they could be entirely avoided by accident.
It’s disappointing.
Absolutely can’t stand watching people play video games. They play wrong.
And the only videos I watch of a game are ones to see what kind of game it is when I don’t know too much beyond word of mouth “this game is great” kind of thing. Sure, you’ve described the game as an action-packed romp with tons of weapons and semi-open world, but the video shows it’s a 2d side scroller with variations of the same 5 pixel “guns” that all shoot the same ball. Not interested.
Beyond that, I have no interest in watching videos. And if companies started trying to somehow cram even more ads into their games to advertise to people watching a stream then I’m even less in than before
I feel that. A few times I had to stop the stream and play the game better myself.
I have to ask if you have ever watched professional level StarCraft 2. Because those people play at an insane level of multitasking and optimization and it is actually beautiful to watch in many cases. The stuff they do is often not even achievable by the average player. I’m sure there are other examples in FPS games and other genres, but what professional RTS players do definitely pushes the level of human cognitive ability.
The obvious barrier to entry here is knowing the game, as you can’t really appreciate things fully unless you’ve played at least a little. But I’ll say that I started off watching LowkoTV and he was entertaining enough to watch until I finally decided to try out the game, and then came to appreciate it even more after that.
Obviously using in game portals to related content creators to push more ads is idiotic, just saying the recognition of the importance of gaming content creators to the games themselves isn’t inherently a bad thing.
Every teenager on YouTube has suddenly become a professional gaming industry analyst for EA, Microsoft, Ubisoft and Bethesda’s failures, and could probably put it on a resume.
“The problem with the industry today…”
Fill in the rest with whatever and you’ve got hours and hours of angry, dissatisfied content for others to nod with.
“ABYSMAL! UNINSPIRED!”
That’s the spirit!
I stream a 25-year-old MMO, EverQuest, about 8 hours a week and lots of viewers just want to live vicariously through my moment remembering when they were doing it themselves without committing 500-1,000 hours to level a character.
I also watch other people play other class types of endgame content to do the same.
I’m not the most engaging streamer, but I enjoy answering questions to my 2-10 viewers. I also enjoy when another streamer answers my own questions.
I don’t understand watching streamers with 4,000 viewers spamming kewk emojis though.
You play live service EQ or P99 or Quarm?
I’ve played them all. EQ definitely the game nearest and dearest to my heart.
I stream and play Quarm exclusively. Best balance of nostalgia and community. <3
I played Quarm until just before Kunark came out. Haven’t played since Kunark but continue to support Secrets on Patreon. She’s putting so much work into it. How’s Kunark doing?
Lots of VP raids these days and there was a kick-ass event for the one year anniversary where we got to play in Plane of Justice for a month with all kinds of fun loot. Raids are instances now, with open world raids still around as well. So there’s none of that P99 FTE sweat going on. Basically, if you raid, you’ll get gear. No bottle necks for epics anymore.
Most of us are ready for Velius, but having fun.
I’ve been really into Meridian 59 lately, but haven’t been playing in the past couple of weeks. Thanks for the reminder.
Makes sense. I usually just put on a 2+ hours long video whenever I’m doing chores. I don’t actually care about Wolfey’s last weird team, it just makes for good background noise.
I have played through Factorio, I have also watched every video doshdoshington has made about it while cooking, doing dishes etc.
Exactly what I did the last few days, great channel :D
Same. I watch VODs about a strategy game I really like playing (EU4) because I rarely have the time to actually dig in to a campaign, so watching/listening to someone else (while I do chores) do what I don’t have for allows me to get some of that connection to a game I love. I do play the game quite a bit (have nearly 1k hours), but not nearly as much as I’d like.
There’s a pretty big difference in what I play vs what I watch though. I generally play action games and watch strategy games, because action games are easy to jump into for an hour or so at a time, whereas strategy games usually need an hour just to remember what I was doing last, so I tend to wait until I can block out an entire evening.
Yep, it’s hard to make time for a several hours long hobby when you’re an adult.
lol yeah, it’s like planning date night with your game.