The Gamer’s Camera

The evolution of sharing gameplay

Evolution of the camera (source: Reddit)

More than 1.7 million gamers are livestreaming their gameplay to 150+ million monthly viewers , which accounts for 20 billion minutes of streamed gameplay viewed each month. While that may seem like a large number at first glance, there are more than 125 million active users on Steam alone, so only 1.3% of that gaming population are streaming gaming video content.

There is plenty of amazing gameplay out there to be shown, though — definitely more than 1.3% of it. Overall, there are over 711 worldwide million PC gamers, and nearly half of them play three or more hours per week, meaning that 100 trillion minutes of video games are being played every month around the globe.

These big numbers bring up an obvious question: If there are so many gamers, why are there so few streamers?

Streaming technology is still at its infancy and somewhat complicated to use. While a select population of gamers are able to share their gameplay, 99.8% of gamers are not.

The evolution of game capture is very similar to that of the photographic camera, in that there’s a lot that has been done and can continue to be done to improve the experience over the years. In fact, there’s still a lot to do to catch up with the usability and convenience of cameras today. Using the camera as an example, though, shows that despite all we have achieved in these early days of game capture , there are still many ways to improve the technology.

Photography: From Product-Market Fit to Platform

Innovation in gameplay recording technology will eventually cause an explosion in creation, sharing, and consumption of gaming content. This exact revolution is already happening in the digital photography space where smartphones are taking over. In 1990, near the tail end of the film era, 57 billion photos were produced each year — today, that figure is closer to 2–3 trillion. Anyone with a phone, camera, tablet, or laptop can capture and share great photos these days.

Photography has recently gone through three important stages of growth and change:

Product-Market Fit: whole industries emerge around a new form of content with big businesses growing to serve them. Tech Disruption: content gets easier and less expensive to create, which unlocks the potential for mass-market content creation and sets the stage for the platform. Platform: integration of camera with software into a single platform makes creation, publishing, distribution totally seamless.

The explosion of content creation over time is directly tied to technological advances and the growth of economic opportunity, first for big companies and then for individuals. It’s only natural that this would affect gaming too.

Product-market fit — Kodak and the Film Camera (1888–1990)

Photography took off when George Eastman invented film in the 1880s. Instead of having to switch heavy plates out the back of the camera for each photo, suddenly you could take multiple pictures on a single roll of film. Eastman’s first camera was called the “Kodak” and was pre-loaded with enough film to produce 100 pictures.

Between 1930 and 1980, photo production exploded, with Kodak holding a virtual monopoly.

Suddenly, many American families were able to afford cameras, and having a camera went from a luxury to what many considered a must-have. Shortly thereafter, the camera’s presence increased even more with the introduction of digital cameras.

Tech Disruption — The Rise of Digital (1990–2010)

Digital had one massive advantage over film — speed. Photojournalists working on tight deadlines could take a picture and have it ready in time for layout in half an hour. They were willing to pay up to $17,000 for a camera that could only take 1.3-megapixel photos, compared with film’s resolution of between 4 and 16 megapixels.

Eventually, this technology became more affordable for consumers too, and by 2002, 2-megapixel cameras were selling for less than $100, and 1-megapixel cameras for less than $60. One year later, thanks to its combination of speed and affordability, global digital camera sales outpaced film camera sales and there was no looking back.

The upshot was that more people could take great-looking photos by simply pointing and shooting, making capturing their everyday moments easier than ever before.

Platform — Camera Meets Phone (2010-Present)

In 2000, cameras were added to cell phones, at first selectively, and soon more frequently. But even though this meant people would have a camera on them at all times, the number of photos taken on phones didn’t edge out those taken on cameras until 2013 because, until then, the quality and functionality was still pretty low. However, smartphone competition quickly grew, and phone manufacturers started to develop better cameras; eventually, that transitioned into making the camera phone more than a camera but also a tool integrated with apps for more uses and greater functionality.

On a smartphone, the camera is integrated with software, which allows photos to be instantaneously created, edited, published, and distributed. As venture capitalist and analyst Benedict Evans writes, “Just as the telephony app is just one app on your smartphone, the camera app is just one app for your image sensor, and not necessarily the most important.”

(source: Mary Meeker, KPCB Internet Trends 2016)

One of the most prominent apps to use the smartphone camera is Facebook. According to Facebook in 2015, 2 billion photos a day are shared on Facebook services. This amounts to around 730 billion photos a year being shared on Facebook alone. That’s nearly 100 times the 8 billion photos produced on film in 1999, at the peak of the film camera.

As shown by Facebook, the ability of smartphone cameras to instantaneously take and share photos has carved out a new step in the prominence of photography in our everyday lives. Now cameras are being used for a wider variety of applications and have shown no signs of slowing down.

Sharing Gameplay: Progressing to Platform

Like the camera, gaming has also come a long way over time. If we consider the early days of sharing gameplay to be screenshots in magazines or written walkthrough guides, then livestreaming is on another level. Even more impressive for gameplay capture, however, is that compared to the 100+ years of the camera, it has come a long way in a fairly short period of time.

Product-Market Fit — Sharing Gameplay Footage (1987–2011)

With the arrival of the internet, conversations around gaming shifted from print to online forums. Over the next ten years, gaming magazines such as Nintendo Power or GamePro fizzled out as gamers built online communities. The comedic website Something Awful set up shop in 1999, and this is where the prominent gaming forum Let’s Play emerged from a thread of The Oregon Trail screenshots.

The first online video with narrated gameplay is anecdotally traced to Michael Sawyer, a console gamer who went by the handle “slowbeef” on the Let’s Play forum. He uploaded a 35-second clip of himself circa 2007 playing The Immortal, sprinkled with commentary.

Looking at it today, the video is grainy, and the audio clips in and out, but by narrating his footage with his own voice, Sawyer did something new — he added a distinctly human touch to the gameplay.

Sawyer inspired the rapid spread of the “Let’s Play” video style. Gamers began recording gameplay, voicing over their videos, and posting them online. This became the template that gamers followed when sharing their content.

When online video took off with the release of YouTube, the Let’s Play video style took off alongside it. By the end of 2013, PewDiePie had built the most successful YouTube channel ever — with over 17 million subscribers — by making gaming video content.

Tech disruption — Livestreaming (2011-Present)

Streaming lowered the barrier to content creation. Rather than having to record, produce, and upload a gameplay video, you could set up a stream, start playing, and it would broadcast all of your gameplay live. And because the broadcast would happen live, it’d encourage more interaction between the streamer and the audience, resulting in tighter-knit communities.

The Gamer’s Camera Today

While streaming may seem easy, publishing and distribution sites like Twitch and YouTube are still separate from the “camera” that captures the video and the game that’s being played.

Like the early digital cameras, streaming software is often difficult to learn and sometimes expensive, which is why we added streaming technology to Forge in April 2016.

Most streaming software requires technical know-how akin to manual focus on old cameras. Consider Twitch’s guide to setting up Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), a separate program needed to capture and stream video. The guide contains over 130 numbered entries to read spread over 15 subsections. With settings for bit rate, resolution, buffer size, and more, setting up a stream takes time and technical savviness.

Streamers integrate OBS to Twitch with a Stream Key

An introduction in screen capture

On top of it all, running a competitive stream isn’t cheap. Popular World of Warcraft streamer Towelliee claimed it cost him $9,000 to set up his stream.

The learning curve and expense are enough to keep the majority of gamers watching, not creating. Streamers today are like the photojournalists of the 1990s using the first digital cameras; they’re a select group of people with the technical expertise and economic incentive to develop unique content.

Currently, only a tiny fraction of video gaming today is captured and streamed because it’s been nearly impossible for normal people to do it, especially considering it takes time and money to learn. I started Forge because I know how fun it can be to share gameplay when the barrier to entry is dropped. The demand is there and gamers are there, so when it becomes as easy to capture a moment of gameplay as it currently is to take a photo on a smartphone, content creation and distribution will flourish.