Something happened yesterday that forever altered my view of Twitch, the mega-popular livestreaming service recently acquired by Amazon. And it got me thinking deeply about the role Twitch plays in games journalism and in a consumer's hunt for information and critical opinion on their potential game purchases.
The premise was completely ordinary. I sat down to stream my first playthrough of Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes 0n Twitch. I aimed my PlayStation 4 camera down at the assortment of Marvel figures so viewers could get a closer look at them, and fired up the game. Within 20 minutes, about 100 members of the community showed up to watch the stream, and they started interacting.
"Play as Spiderman!" one viewer exclaimed. So I plunked Spidey down on the Base and fought through one of Disney Infinity 2.0's tower defense levels, taking audience suggestions on where to place turrets and which character to fight back the hordes with. "Can you download that 'I Am Groot' Toybox level?" another asked, so I obliged. "Build a castle!" Ok, no problem!
I fed off their enthusiasm and invited viewers to essentially guide the stream as I played, lending a layer of interactivity to the experience for them -- and for me.
About an hour in, we were having an awesome two-way discussion about the dynamics of each character, analyzing their skill trees and debating if Nova was faster than Captain America. We had a conversation about the game appealing to kids at heart, not just kids.
One viewer was a hardcore Disney junkie and helped answer questions in the chat that I couldn't tackle (thanks SgtStryker!)
But the "A-ha!" moment came when someone simply typed "Twitch is the new game demo."
That stopped me in my tracks. Traditional game demos -- carefully chosen vertical slices of upcoming games -- used to be the norm, but publishers have been releasing them less and less. This leaves video content like "Let's Plays" on YouTube and live streams of new releases wide open to fill that void. But interestingly (at least based on the viewers I chatted with), there seems to be a real desire for Twitch streamers who engage and interact more with their audience.
Beyond that, here's what fascinated me most about the experience. There were 100 different sets of eyeballs helping me evaluate Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes. They uprooted the traditional checkboxes I look for when reviewing a game and gave me a dozen fresh perspectives. They were the people interested in spending their hard-earned cash on the game, so they guided the experience and they drove the direction of the playthrough because this Twitch stream was about them and for them, not for me and not to satisfy a preset criteria of how a review should be handled.
For all intents and purposes, they held the controller. And that's the power of Twitch, the power I didn't realize it had until yesterday, until establishing a truly two-way dialogue with my audience.
Why is this a threat to traditional games journalism and reviews? It's an unbiased, unfiltered look. It's the potential consumer experiencing the game and evaluating it based on their personal criteria, their rules, and you're the conduit. That's powerful, and it's fulfilling. I had at least a dozen viewers contact me on
I've said before that Twitch has the power to threaten traditional, text-based (and thus one-sided) games journalism. Now I'm convinced that this could and should be the new platform for reviewing video games, by putting the experience in your community's hands.
