Why do people watch others play video games? An empirical study on the motivations of Twitch users

Highlights

• The study lays groundwork for understanding video stream consumer motivations.

• Tension release strong positive impactor on hours watched for video game streams.

• Social integrative motivations found to impact subscription behaviour.

• Informating seeking shown to impact number of streamers watched.

Abstract

This study investigates why people choose to watch others play video games, on services such as Twitch. Through a questionnaire study (N = 1097), we examine five distinct types of motivations from the uses and gratifications perspective: cognitive, affective, personal integrative, social integrative and tension release. Information seeking is shown to be positively associated with the amount of hours that users chose to spend on the service, as well as the amount of individual streamers they choose to watch. Furthermore, we find that tension release, social integrative and affective motivations are positively associated with how many hours people watch streams. We also find that social integrative motivations are the primary predictor of subscription behaviour. This study lays the groundwork for understanding the motivations to consume this emerging form of new media in the context of online games and video streams.

Introduction

Hundreds of millions of users choose to spend their time watching others play video games through live internet broadcasts, referred to as streams, on services such as Twitch. This type of new media has both been made possible and fueled by the ever increasing bandwidth of networks, advances in video packing and encoding technologies, a user-generated content culture, and, ultimately, by the desire to see others play video games. Today, peer-to-peer internet streaming of video games is a rapidly growing form of media. Recent years have seen services doubling their user base year-on-year, with current figures reaching over a hundred million unique monthly users (Ewalt, 2014, Needleman, 2015, Twitch, 2015).

Streaming is an extremely interesting context for participatory online media, spearheaded by services such as YouTube, that have put the traditional consumer into the role of content creator (Cha, Kwak, Rodriguez, Ahn, & Moon, 2007). Content creators such as PewDiePie challenge traditional media corporations, having over 27 million subscribers on YouTube alone in 2014 and over 40 million at the time of writing, showing the impact a single individual can have on the media landscape (Grundberg & Hansegard, 2014). One might regard streaming as yet another form of broadcast entertainment akin to online videos, but for many users it is a more manifold and holistic communication channel than mere video media content, particularly due to the high levels of interaction. Due to the live-broadcasting nature of video game streaming, it offers a unique relationship between the media creator and media consumer, thus facilitating communication between the two. Other forms of new media such as YouTube have already adopted practices common to social network sites (SNS) (boyd and Ellison, 2007, Lange, 2007), however video game streaming services take these participatory aspects one step further as the interaction is taking place in real time. Video game streaming also blends two distinct mediums: broadcast media and games. While television spectating has largely been considered to be a unidirectional activity, games are commonly perceived as a multi-directional activity requiring active user participation. Hence, a mixture of these dominant media forms leads to an interesting context of spectating video games with a degree of interaction, thus causing an experience that is more passive than playing games, but at the same time more active than consuming traditional television content.

However, it is not fully clear why peer-to-peer internet streaming gathers such large crowds of spectators, and if this growth is a sign of a more general trend in media consumption and information seeking, or merely a niche form of entertainment. As we do not have a clear grasp of the motives driving consumption behaviour, we see it as paramount to explore these motivations in order to build a deeper understanding. Therefore, in this paper we seek to explore and measure why so many people are choosing to watch others play games over the Internet, focusing specifically on the context of video game streaming which is the largest form of such online live peer-to-peer media production and consumption. We employ data gathered through an online survey (N = 1097) and analyse the data by employing structural equation modelling.