A new way to buy
Seth Sivak on how to sell games directly from Twitch streams
Well, it was only ever a matter of time. Amazon bought game-streaming service Twitch in 2014, so it makes sense that the retail giant would eventually want to nudge all those viewers towards the checkout. That has now happened with
Streamline, a game currently available in Early Access that’s designed specifically with streamers and their audiences in mind. Any Twitch stream of Streamline has a ‘Get this game’ link underneath. If a viewer clicks it, connects their Amazon and Twitch accounts and buys the game, the streamer gets a 30 per cent cut of the purchase price. Twitch calls this a Bounty, and it’s a new opt-in feature available to Twitch Partners – the streamers with the largest audiences who already receive a cut of revenue from the advertising that runs alongside their videos.
“The early prototypes for the game were actually called H&S because they were [based on] hide and seek,” Seth Sivak, CEO of Streamline developer Proletariat Inc, tells us. “That eventually moved to be a much faster-paced game, with parkour-style movement, and that was really just from a ton of time spent watching the game and seeing what was exciting for players and viewers.” The result is an asymmetric multiplayer game in which a hunter, wielding a giant stop sign, must chase and swat a team of runners.
Streamline is currently the only game available to buy through Twitch, but it seems likely to be just the beginning. The game’s design team worked with Twitch through the latter’s Developer Success initiative, which exists to encourage developers to make games with Twitch integration at their core.
Just as developers tailor their games to the physical hardware they’ll be played on, so too do they now tailor their games to Twitch. This has led to all kinds of industry changes, from a surge of wannabe esports and indie horror titles, to innovations such as letting livestream viewers influence games directly to troll the streamer – by triggering traps, for example. Vlambeer, creator of poppy topdown shooter Nuclear Throne, went so far as to hack in the ability to buy its game from Twitch streams back in 2014.
Sivak says he’s glad that being able to sell games through Twitch lets him reach the game’s intended audience directly. As for who that audience is, there’s not much information publicly available. The most recently released official figures put Twitch’s user count at over 100 million, watching an average of 421.6 minutes per month. That’s a lot of opportunities to flog games.
People who watch Twitch streams do so for different reasons. Some are there for the personality of the streamer, while some are looking to improve their own skills at a particular game. “I think others are there to find their next game,” Sivak says. “Which is why you see, especially the singleplayer games, [their stats] spike up quickly in the first week they’re out, because everyone’s curious: ‘Should I buy this?’ Then they go back down because people have made that decision.”
It’s this last group that seems most likely to have a negative reaction to the streamers they watch getting a kickback from sales of the games they’re broadcasting. “The direction that this stuff is going, with influencers driving a lot of the marketing and then when you start to have payment involved in there, I think it does change the discussion,” Sivak says. “I don’t know what the sentiment’s going to be like as we see more of this but, from our perspective on Streamline, that hasn’t really come up as an issue.”
While selling games seems a natural direction for Twitch, its public FAQ on the subject is unclear about the company’s future plans but states that it’s interested in seeing the “community’s reception to Streamline being available for purchase via our platform”. In other words, ‘Expect more of this, unless you’re angry at us about it’. It also describes the bounty as a “one-time promotion”, implying that in future Twitch will keep more of the money for itself.
In any case, genuine outrage seems unlikely. Sponsored content is already a part of the language of Twitch, just as advertising breaks are a part of the language of commercial television.
“I’m not sure how viewers are going to start to see [sponsored content],” Sivak says, “but I think it’s going to be harder for a lot of broadcasters to hide how engaged and how interested they are. You can watch some broadcasters when they’re doing sponsored stuff and you can tell they’re not having fun with it. I think that’s going to be a big challenge.”
There might be a more fundamental challenge to overcome first: at the time of writing, there is only one person streaming Streamline, and they have zero viewers. Twitch integration is in its infancy and direct sales seem likely to be a part of its future, but like all new platforms, it still needs its killer app.
“I think it’s going to be harder for a lot of broadcasters to hide how engaged and how interested they are”