Pikachu, Ash, Skrtel and Bulbasaur weren’t happy when they realised someone else had completed Twitch Plays Pokémon (Picture: File)

The world of video games changes beyond all recognition almost every few years, but one of the rare constants has always been the acknowledgement that watching other people play them is boring.

The rise of professional eSports has changed that to a degree, but as a rule of thumb the vast majority would rather play a game than watch someone else do it for them. That it is until Twitch.

The stats speak for themselves but the success of Twitch has been staggering, generating more peak internet traffic than even Facebook. Despite the service being less than three years old, it’s completely bypassed mainstream media to make video games the most important topic for online socialising.



People may watch increasing little live television nowadays but on Twitch the average viewer watches at least an hour and a half every day.


Although Twitch was officially launched in June 2011, it spun out from the Justin.tv website, which helped to popularise the concept of ‘lifecasting’ by allowing anyone to stream any kind of content they want online.

‘After a couple of years the single largest area of interest on Justin.tv was video games,’ Twitch European director Stuart Saw told Metro. ‘Twitch was a subsidiary at first but now it’s its own entity.’

Exactly what is being streamed via Twitch can vary greatly, from magazine style shows to footage of games with audio commentary from the person playing. But whatever’s going on, each viewer has a chance to chat via text with the stream’s creator and everyone else who is watching.

‘It’s a very interactive experience, it’s a very social experience,’ said Saw. ‘Twitch is not just about watching other people play video games, it’s about interacting with everyone viewing. Whether it’s a popular player, a magazine show, or eSports people are chatting and experiencing it together. So it’s a massive social collaboration experience. And that all kind of led to Twitch Plays Pokémon, which was a truly corroborative experience.’

Twitch Plays Pokémon is exactly what it sounds like, whether that seems to make sense or not. It was an idea dreamt up by an Australian computer programmer, who adapted the Twitch interface to allow fellow users to control an emulation of the original Pokémon Red game from 1996. Because of the simplicity of the original Game Boy controls, and the turn-based nature of the combat, the whole game can be controlled with very simple inputs and requires no quick reactions.

As a result, Twitch players were able to control the game by typing text command in the chat room, with the concept eventually being streamlined to take a poll of other users’ suggestions – essentially allowing the game to be controlled by democratic vote.

The creator of the channel refuses to be named but Metro was able to talk to him under condition of anonymity. ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon was my first time broadcasting on Twitch. Before that I only ever used it to watch the occasional live stream made by YouTube channels that I follow,’ he revealed. ‘At the start I wasn’t sure if many people would care at all and then it exploded in popularity within a few days.’



Again, you only have to look at the stats to see what an understatement this is, although attempts to adapt the concept for other games with real-time action have so far struggled to work as well.

Despite the success, not only is Twitch unknown to many ordinary people, but until the service was integrated with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – so that footage could be streamed direct from the consoles – many gamers had never heard of it either. But now that it’s easily accessible from most major gaming platforms, the difference between chatting while you play on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network, compared to discussing a stream on Twitch, has proven a significant draw.

‘Twitch is a social content experience, whereas Xbox Live and PSN is a social gaming experience’, said Saw. ‘So, for example, if you want to play Call Of Duty you’ll go into the game and find people to play with and you’re creating the content yourself. But on Twitch it’s an experience orientated around the content that’s being producing by someone else, and so the social interaction is a lot more varied.’

Michael ‘ODEE’ O’Dell runs Team Dignitas, Britain’s top professional gaming team and currently one of the most successful in the world – with 72 players in 18 countries. But without Twitch they’d never have the exposure to operate as they do now.

‘Everything changed for eSports about three years ago when Twitch suddenly appeared, because instead of us competing and hoping that maybe mainstream would come and look at us so we could get bigger sponsors, Twitch allowed us to be seen by every single gamer out there,’ he said.


‘Our players practice all the time and those sessions are on Twitch and they reach about 20m views a month. That doesn’t even include the tournaments we play in. So basically Twitch has enabled mass viewership for any broadcaster for free, and that’s the fantastic part about it.’

Allowing the streaming of thousands of broadcasts watched by millions of people around the world is no trivial task, and Twitch runs one of the single largest private video networks in the world. Only the likes of Google and Apple are bigger, and the infrastructure costs are enormous – which is one reason why Xbox Live and PSN haven’t offered the same sort of service natively.

But according to Saw there is no appetite to take on Microsoft and Sony as game publishers. ‘We want to enable other people, but given we work with every other publisher and hardware manufacturer, we can’t suddenly start competing with them for their own customers,’ he said.

Twitch’s aim is to support games content wherever it already exists, including even mobile games – with over 50 iOS titles currently being enabled. Although the true utility for smartphones and tablets may simply be to provide a second screen so people can play games and chat on Twitch at the same time.

‘People are saying they’re not going to watch TV, they’re going to watch Twitch,’ said Saw. ‘We want to make Twitch as accessible as any other big social network. We didn’t want to use the term social network but it’s really the only way we can describe the accessibility and the mass appeal that we now have.’