According to a recent study, players spend on average more time watching video games in streaming… Rather than playing! For the authors of the report, publishers should see this as an opportunity to diversify their income. But it's not easy to dethrone YouTube or Twitch, the kings of the field.
We have known for several years now that young people are increasingly abandoning traditional TV in favor of video games and streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and Twitch. According to a study published in April 2023, users are more in a multimedia logicwhere different platforms and media intersect. We discover a video game thanks to a series for example. The explosion in sales of The Last of US games after the broadcast of the series perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. The same goes for the Fallout series, or even with Arkane. The Netflix show allowed League of Legends to fill up with new players.
But according to a brand new report produced by researchers at Midia Research, this virtuous dynamic has lost some of its splendor. More precisely, video games are losing ground to video game streaming. According to this study, players would increasingly prefer to watch JV streaming, rather than being behind the controller.
Players prefer to watch rather than play
According to the report, gamers devote an average of 16 hours per week to their favorite hobby. And if they spend about 7.4 hours fighting/driving/surviving/building on their PCs and consoles, they spend the remaining 8.5 hours watching JV streaming on Twitch or YouTube. According to the authors of this study, video game publishers like EA, Ubisoft or Activision should capitalize on this trend by creating their own video platform. “This untapped potential of game publishers to integrate video content into their own ecosystem” could theoretically attract advertising revenue and subscriptions/financial support that currently benefit other media or content creators.
Afterwards, it is difficult to see how these publishers could overpower Twitch and YouTube, the two benchmarks in this area. Why would users leave two platforms where they have their habits, where they can see everything, in favor of a closed ecosystem reserved for games from a single publisher? They probably won't.
Source : GameSpot
