Co-creating games with customers:a study of online communities and live streaming implications for video game companies

Abstract. Over the past decades, the implications associated with the development of new technologies has thoroughly affected businesses. With the rise in popularity of live-streaming, newer changes are being noticed in both customers and businesses behaviors. Due to the close ties that the live-streaming platform Twitch.tv shares with video game companies, the associated implications of live-streaming in this context are questioned. Therefore, this thesis aims at assessing the impact of live-streaming on the notions of customer involvement, online communities and value co-creation in video game companies. To study this phenomenon, the following research question was formulated: What is the importance of customer involvement, community building and live-streaming in the context of video game development, and how relevant is it for video game companies? In order to answer this research question, the thesis followed qualitative research methods. The formation of the theoretical framework was done through extensive literature review of previous relevant academic articles, aiming at providing an accurate overview of the concepts central to the study. Online communities, value co-creation and relevant surrounding theories were thusly described. The empirical data of the study was collected through semi-structured interviews with employees and managers of video game companies. The data was analyzed thematically in order to assess, recognize, define and elaborate the essential elements and challenges relating to the phenomenon studied. Based on the theoretical and empirical data, video game companies were found to be aware and familiar with the central concepts of this thesis. An important part of the insights from the theoretical framework utilized and conceptualized in this thesis were confirmed by the analysis of the empirical data. Moreover, extensive evidence of both theoretical and managerial implications for video game companies were highlighted. These effects could be noticed on the ways in which companies plan and conduct their business, or even on how they are organized and structured. Live-streaming was found to be relevant for video game companies both within the context of live-streams conducted by external parties, through paid sponsorships for example, but also from the possibilities for companies to organize and conduct live-streaming sessions by themselves. The main finding achieved through this thesis is thus twofold. On one hand, the implications of customer involvement and online communities in video games companies were thoroughly demonstrated. On the other hand, the role of live-streaming in this context was elucidated, and so was the connection between live-streaming, customer involvement and online communities. The results of this thesis can thus be utilized by video game companies as a framework to understand the environment in which they are operating and to evaluate the degree to which their company processes integrate the key elements identified by this research. Additionally, this thesis provides suggestions for future research about the implications of live-streaming in other contexts

Analysis of the Characteristics and Content of Twitch Live-streaming

YouTube is the most popular community-driven video streaming Website, and thus has been the subject of many studies. Similarly, Twitch is the most popular community driven live-streaming Website, broadcasting gaming content live to millions of people. Despite their similarities, less is known about Twitch\u27s streaming and content characteristics. This project gathers data on Twitch through three tools: A Web crawler, a survey, and a third-party Website. Analysis of the results shows the following: Game popularity changes unpredictably over time, as age increases, the number of people that use Twitch decreases, and there are only two commonly used resolutions between most popular and least popular channels. The results should aid in the development of future live-streaming platforms

Toward Generalized Psychovisual Preprocessing For Video Encoding

Deep perceptual preprocessing has recently emerged as a new way to enable further bitrate savings across several generations of video encoders without breaking standards or requiring any changes in client devices. In this article, we lay the foundation for a generalized psychovisual preprocessing framework for video encoding and describe one of its promising instantiations that is practically deployable for video-on-demand, live, gaming, and user-generated content (UGC). Results using state-of-the-art advanced video coding (AVC), high efficiency video coding (HEVC), and versatile video coding (VVC) encoders show that average bitrate [Bjontegaard delta-rate (BD-rate)] gains of 11%-17% are obtained over three state-of-the-art reference-based quality metrics [Netflix video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF), structural similarity index (SSIM), and Apple advanced video quality tool (AVQT)], as well as the recently proposed nonreference International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication?(ITU-T) P.1204 metric. The proposed framework on CPU is shown to be twice faster than × 264 medium-preset encoding. On GPU hardware, our approach achieves 714 frames/sec for 1080p video (below 2 ms/frame), thereby enabling its use in very-low-latency live video or game streaming applications

Decentralized Adaptive Helper Selection in Multi-channel P2P Streaming Systems

In Peer-to-Peer (P2P) multichannel live streaming, helper peers with surplus bandwidth resources act as micro-servers to compensate the server deficiencies in balancing the resources between different channel overlays. With deployment of helper level between server and peers, optimizing the user/helper topology becomes a challenging task since applying well-known reciprocity-based choking algorithms is impossible due to the one-directional nature of video streaming from helpers to users. Because of selfish behavior of peers and lack of central authority among them, selection of helpers requires coordination. In this paper, we design a distributed online helper selection mechanism which is adaptable to supply and demand pattern of various video channels. Our solution for strategic peers' exploitation from the shared resources of helpers is to guarantee the convergence to correlated equilibria (CE) among the helper selection strategies. Online convergence to the set of CE is achieved through the regret-tracking algorithm which tracks the equilibrium in the presence of stochastic dynamics of helpers' bandwidth. The resulting CE can help us select proper cooperation policies. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves good convergence, load distribution on helpers and sustainable streaming rates for peers

Making Games Watchable: Broadcasting Video Games and Playing Attention

Making Games Watchable examines spectator video gaming as an emergent media phenomenon with an attention to the way it relates to a wider media ecosystem. Industries and platforms of video game spectatorship are recent inventions. Games have long been watchable, an effect of their nature as screen media. Productions designed to formalize and distribute play as streaming content have arrived as the culmination of technological affordances, platform and participatory media, and the globalization of gaming culture writ large. As emerging media, video game watching is actualized across a number of platforms and in several distinct formats. The variety and novelty of these practices has limited the study of watchable gaming as a collective phenomenon. However, in the last half-decade an industry of platforms for distributing spectator video game content has succeeded by aggregating disparate modes of game spectatorship, signaling a need to think of game watching as its own kind of media. This dissertation is focused on particular cases where game spectatorship is solidified as a media form. The throughline for this research is the formalized practice of watching video games. Rather than an exhaustive study of any specific platform, format, or industry, this work considers competitive play, video game live streaming, and Let’s Play videos among a wider set of contexts in which games are shared online or watched in specific spatial arrangements. This project examines these contexts with the aim of articulating how play is repackaged and distributed as spectator media, and how these platforms for game viewing produce new relationships to play. The goal of this work is to ask what this emergence can teach us about the way media making or media audiences are changing. What changes have occurred to produce a media ecosystem that is hospitable to spectator play? And what practices or processes are needed to make games watchable? The intervention is critical and theoretical, seeking to attach game streaming to a wider media ecosystem, to the political economy it emerges out of, and to its growing cultural impact.The work of making games watchable includes practices taking place on different platforms, emerging out of production contexts that vary widely in scale, and aim at vastly different kinds of markets and ends. To explore this complexity this project adopts a research method drawing from site-specific studies of game spectatorship, oral histories of production, and a political economy of streaming platforms. The primary archive for this project comes from conversations with 30 video game live streamers between December 2015 and March 2016. This dissertation also draws from grounded site studies of esports studios located in Seoul, South Korea and Los Angeles, California, as well as trade conventions and streaming studios. These archives are examined against a political economy and cultural analysis of platforms and markets for video game spectatorship. Through this research, this dissertation articulates a transformation of video game play from interactive media to spectator content by examining the industrial frameworks and production processes that repackage play for an audience of watchers. It also suggests three interventions in the areas of game and production studies. Making Games Watchable finds video game spectatorship is the extension of wider trends in media making, in the domestication of content production, and the personalization or deeper segmentation of media choice. Video game spectatorship industries are sustained by production arrangements blurring the boundaries between labor and leisure activities, and between domestic space and production space. They are built on forms of marketing that move away from mass appeal towards higher degrees of interactivity, intimacy, loyalty, influence, and patronage. And finally, they succeed through identifying and catering to micro-scale audiences in ways that enable novel kinds of content creation, especially in response to the values and biases of these audiences. At the forefront of trends in streaming and interactive media, video game spectatorship production offers insights into future trends in media making

Let’s Play: A Walkthrough of Quarter-Century-Old Copyright Precedent as Applied to Modern Video Games

Looking to the copyright protection over the audiovisual displays of video games, current precedent—created by extensive litigation in the 1980s over early arcade games—may be a round hole into which the square peg of today’s highly complex video games would have difficulty fitting. This is an issue that has increasing importance as the market for the passive consumption of video game audiovisual displays through tournament streams, walk-throughs, etc., continues to balloon. If courts were to apply precedent from litigation in the 1980s to video games as they exist today, the idea that copyright protection automatically attaches to any and all audiovisual displays generated by a game may not hold true. It is uncertain to what extent the reasoning in early arcade game litigation regarding the issues of authorship, the idea/expression dichotomy, and fixation would yield similar holdings. Moreover, it appears similarly uncertain to what extent a retreat from earlier precedent may impact publishers’ rights in downstream uses of audiovisual displays. Even if potential defendants prevailed under either an idea/expression dichotomy theory or a fixation theory—meaning the copyright does not attach to audiovisuals at the outset—later-fixed audiovisuals may still be protectable. The strongest argument potential defendants have, therefore, is that their interaction with the game precludes copyrightability for the audiovisual displays due to a lack of “original authorship” on the part of the publishers

An Ecosystem Framework for the Meta in Esport Games

This paper examines the evolving landscape of modern digital games, emphasizing their nature as live services that continually evolve and adapt. In addition to engaging with the core gameplay, players and other stakeholders actively participate in various game-related experiences, such as tournaments and streaming. This interplay forms a vibrant and intricate ecosystem, facilitating the construction and dissemination of knowledge about the game. Such knowledge flow, accompanied by resulting behavioral changes, gives rise to the concept of a video game meta. Within the competitive gaming context, the meta represents the strategic and tactical knowledge that goes beyond the fundamental mechanics of the game, enabling players to gain a competitive advantage. We present a review of the state-of-the-art of knowledge for game metas and propose a novel model for the meta knowledge structure and propagation that accounts for this ecosystem, based on a review of the academic literature and practical examples. By exploring the dynamics of knowledge exchange and its influence on gameplay, the review presented here sheds light on the intricate relationship between game evolution, player engagement, and the associated emergence of game meta

Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games 201