Many video game personalities maintain a presence on both platforms, which, until recently, coexisted peacefully. His YouTube videos, of which there are a couple thousand, have generated more than 10 billion views. The most popular artist on all of YouTube is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, a 26-year-old Swede who’s grown rich laughing, screaming, and cursing maniacally while playing video games. While Twitch dominates live-streaming, YouTube is the premier destination for recorded-and-edited gaming clips. Twitch, which acquired in September 2014 for about $970 million, is the front-runner in this growing market, but it faces a serious challenge from a powerful adversary: Google’s YouTube. among 18- to 24-year-old men fell 16 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, according to Nielsen, in the second quarter of this year TV viewership in the U.S. The genre now generates $3.8 billion in estimated revenue, primarily from advertising and corporate sponsorships. This year, 486 million people around the world will watch “gaming video content,” according to the market analysis firm SuperData Research, up 28 percent from last year. Thanks in part to the surging popularity of eSports-particularly in Asia but also increasingly in North America and Europe-video-game-inspired programming is emerging as a lucrative sector of the entertainment industry. The biggest clusters of fans tend to form around live professional tournaments, also known as eSports, or on the streams of particularly charismatic Twitch personalities. There are swarms of people playing League of Legends, World of Warcraft, FIFA soccer, Mario Kart, Minecraft, Guitar Hero, Grand Theft Auto, Farming Simulator (which is exactly what it sounds like), Poker, Destiny, Halo-and on and on. The range of channels to choose from feels endless. First-time visitors to Twitch contend with a dizzying, kaleidoscopic galaxy of viewing options. With little more than a fast Internet connection and a webcam, anybody can become a Twitch broadcaster.Īttracting an audience is the hard part. Along the side of the screen, in an emoji-strewn chat stream, everyone mixes it up. Stars such as Valnicek gather admirers as they narrate action, explain strategy, mock opponents, and celebrate victories. It’s her full-time job and occasionally results in a spontaneous four-figure D. She’s now 23 and one of the top performers on Twitch. “My success is really dependent on how happy, bubbly, and excited I am,” she says. Her skills as a performer are self-taught. Growing up, Valnicek dreamed of being a doctor or a corporate rainmaker, not an entertainer. Occasionally, she’ll back away from the computer to show off one of her signature moves, nimbly moonwalking for the camera. While Valnicek wanders through battlefields slaying terrorists, she banters with her audience, welcoming familiar viewers to the stream, thanking everyone for watching, encouraging fans to check out her other social media pages, and playfully turning down marriage proposals. Typically, they watch Valnicek in a split-screen format, with her gameplay in one window and a smaller projection of her head and torso, captured via webcam, in another. Soon, for three hours a day, five days a week, using the screen name KittyPlaysGames, Valnicek was streaming herself playing death matches in various games, most frequently Counter-Strike, a popular first-person shooter.įans follow her footage on a website called Twitch, which bills itself as a social network for video game fans. Valnicek, whose bright green eyes and dyed black hair make her look like Shannen Doherty during her Beverly Hills 90210 years, pressed on. Several months earlier, in early 2014, Valnicek had dropped out of the University of Saskatchewan, where she’d been an undergraduate studying accounting and law, to pursue a new kind of Internet career: playing video games for a live, online audience. “Oh my God, it’s real.” Someone with the username Andy, a fan she’d never met, had just given her a D-her shorthand for donation-of almost $7,000. She cupped her hands over her mouth and fell to her bedroom floor. Kristen Valnicek stared at her computer in disbelief.
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