Twitch is not just watching games, it's waiting for them

Earlier this week, Sony announced the Grounding of death release date via a nearly day Twitch stream that only shows hand prints appearing on a black screen. The reasons why fans would look at this are obvious: Anticipation is exciting and contagious. The reasons why it is encouraged by publishers are also obvious. Internet marketing has always sought to use fan enthusiasm to gain business benefits, and anticipation is often the easiest way to do it. Countdown clocks, trailers, reality-alternative games and riddles are all ways to excite fans and make them talk about a game.

Twitch has become so important in video games that publishers have made it an essential part of their marketing efforts. Twitch streams can be viewed at places and times where games are not an option. they can also be viewed as the games are played. It's a place of irresistible attention for a company that has games to sell, which allows it to find a way to convince its fans to spend more time on Twitch. They do not even have to engage in a game that's out now. It's like that that we come to death grounding.

the Grounding of death the effort was confusing, as the hype of Kojima tends to be. The flow was mostly a black image, with some outlines of hand prints and a strange music. At noon, the full video was aired, a nearly nine-minute trailer for Grounding of death. The plan seems to have worked and the Grounding of death A trailer recorded nearly five million views in one day.

There was not really any reason to watch the live stream – no mystery to be solved, no real public participation apart from presenting themselves. What's more, anyone who is online enough to watch a TV stream is also online enough to know when the end result of the stream is reached without worrying about the deal. The stream recalls another absurd moment of live marketing, when HBO decided to reveal the date of Game of thrones & # 39; seventh season by hiding it in a block of ice, which would eventually melt and show a date to the world. A date that fans would have finally learned anyway, and posted anyway.

Twitch is already a kind of closed loop, integrated with the machines we play on, so we can stream games and watch streaming games. But publishers have increasingly tried to control the contours of this loop, using their resources to tip the odds in their favor.

If you watched the Borderlands 3 Last month, you had the chance to win a loot in the game. Last fall, watching affiliate streamers on Twitch for an hour could have given you early access to Black Ops 4Blackout beta. Rocket League Fans can earn exclusive personalization rewards by linking their accounts and watching feeds. These rewards are offered through the Twitch Drops program, which has also been integrated by other publishers and developers. When Division 2The first raid was posted earlier this month, fans who watched selected banners could win items in the game. In Twitch's economy of attention, publishers have vast capital that no one has: information on the highly anticipated games to broadcast, and many door prizes for video game players released.

While big budget games are moving away from static and unobtrusive products to a "games as a service" model, attention has become a scarce resource. There are only a multitude of games that one person can pay attention to at a time – and when these are persistent business, it is possible to anticipate many future games. So we have hype as a service, and all that the publishers will try to keep their audience focused on an upcoming game, in the hope that long-term anticipation can translate into long-term interest. term once this game came out. And what better place to see this happen than on Twitch – the best place to watch and wait for games.