Twitch streamers and game developers are trapped in a broken system

“I feel like the majority of my life has been in front of a screen,” Turner “Tfue” Tenney reflected amid tears. A fateful kill against Tyler “Ninja” Blevins back in 2019 had catapulted Tenney to fame, and his audience went on to outgrow that of Twitch’s most mainstream star. But in 2022? Fortnite’s golden boy — whose name is synonymous with the battle royale game’s most recognizable character, Jonesy — called it quits. For many, Tenney’s retirement video was a sign of yet another Twitch star grappling with burnout: sad, yet familiar. Tenney’s retirement video was a sign of yet another Twitch star struggling with burnout: sad, but familiar.

Tenney had a charismatic talent that was on show at least 8 hours per day, every single day. But his ascent was a complicated one that reflected many of gaming’s biggest growing pains during the influencer era. Tenney was an early influencer Fortnite esports champion; we now know that esports is a bubble that’s burned millions of dollars. Tenney rode a FortniteEpic Games made billions from this wave. However, a few short years after the event, it had to lay off more than 830 workers. When Tenney blew up, everyone was salivating over Drake and what his livestream appearance signaled for Twitch’s future; now both the rapper and many of the platform’s stars are better known for promoting gambling over hits. Tenney gained attention after joining FaZe Clan. This gaming lifestyle company was so successful that celebrities like Snoop Dogg endorsed it. FaZe Clan now is an infamous penny share and tried to scam him, Tenney said.

Where all these disasters converge is Twitch, the livestreaming platform that’s home to over 30 million daily viewers. After endless headlines about the loss of top talent, the bad management policies and platform, as well as creator burnout, many would claim that Twitch is in trouble. The idea that Twitch lost its direction after an apparent golden age is a simple narrative, but it misses out on something more profound. If Twitch is in trouble in 2023, it’s not because things have gotten worse. Everything you’re seeing is the natural progression of an unsustainable system. The prognosis has always been terminal; we’ve just refused to see it because it’s been profitable.

It didn’t take long for publishers to see that Twitch could make or break a game. Twitch’s personalities and platform became increasingly popular in the year 2018. FortniteIt was so influential that the entire gaming industry began modeling itself after it. Although the game’s surprising gameplay and approachable visuals made it a good watch, what kept viewers interested was its engaging aesthetic. FortniteThe model was able to transform the fad into a lasting trend. Content expansions or adjustments used to take many months or even years to be made. You might also have had to pay money in order to view them. FortniteEstablish a standard that is more aggressive: Free weekly content updates.

Epic could swing this ceaseless delivery because the bulk of its profits at the time came from its engine, which many games — including Fortnite’s competitors — license. This was the reason why FortniteEpic’s formula made the bubbly shooter possible. Epic was able to quickly adjust because of the cadence. FortniteWhatever the latest fashion or novelty was, The Among UsYou can also find out more about Splatoon. Like Roblox, Fortnite became a game that could give you anything — and if Epic didn’t emulate it, the players would.

“You can’t replicate Fortnite’s growth from, like, the [content creator] standpoint and also definitely from the developer standpoint,” says a Twitch streamer turned game developer who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to discuss the popular AAA live-service shooter that he works on.

Publishers could not care less about the conditions, as they were only interested in profits. Suddenly, “live service” was everywhere — and games like Overwatch, which couldn’t achieve a similar pace, were posed as disappointments by content creators.

Epic Games

Do players need to be able to play their favourite game every day and have something new each week? It is a rare feat for developers to get half their players finish games. This is because most people never complete a game that they begin. 22 percent of Steam games are never played. The percentages can be affected by many factors such as if the game is part of an offer or Game Pass. However, they are still indicative. Statista reports that 25% of gamers between 18-34 enjoy playing games for between 3 and 6 hours per week. 28% of them play less than two hours, while 19% spend between 13 and 24 hours. Fans spend less and less time playing games as they age. The most active age group has half the participants playing only two to three hours per week.

A serious Twitch player who logs in a whole workday or goes live every day will play more games than their viewers. Twitch streamers can’t stop; a mere two-day pause might mean losing thousands of paying subscribers. There’s a big incentive to keep up with live-service updates as well. There’s some FOMO involved; while certain events with special prizes happen yearly, other big occasions, like season finales, only happen once. But the numbers don’t lie: Your viewership will definitely be impacted by new patches that float the game in question to Twitch’s front page.

“Multiplayer games will start decreasing in viewership after the first week as the launch hype dies down and then it’s a question of how good the game is perceived to be that will determine its long term fate,” says StreamElements’ public relations director Chase. “With those in for the long haul, viewership tends to plateau and then spike when new content and patches are released or if it is supported by competitive events.”

While the playing habits of a Twitch streamer don’t represent the average player by any means, content creators certainly shape public opinion about games.

“Negative sentiment is very profitable,” says the AAA game developer, who noted that social media platforms are built to highlight popular — and sometimes caustic — content. The tension that arises from this dynamic is between the game developer and the hardcore gamers, such as Twitch streamers. Although Twitch players aren’t the primary audience for most games, they are some of the most visible.

“I don’t at all think that streamers are embodying some typical player behaviors, like ‘Brandon,’” the developer continues, posing a name for an imaginary everyday consumer. “There’s definitely a model of consumers nowadays who probably parrot those sentiments. They did not arrive at those conclusions themselves.”

The misinformation will vary, but Twitch both shapes that discourse while also becoming the very metric that people use to make sense of a game’s situation. It’s gotten so bad that people scrutinize Twitch longevity for single-player games, not just live-service or multiplayer ones.

And so, to keep up with expectations, games as a whole are getting longer — and more expensive. It takes multiple studios to keep yearly live-service franchises like Call of Duty afloat, as noted in the CMA’s report on Activision Blizzard. The same report states that the budget for a AAA title can be anywhere between $80 and $380 millions, while seasonal updates require anything from $50 to $65million. To keep up with competition, publishers need to invest nearly as much as it takes to create a large-budget title. To compare, the budget for a Tomb Raider modern game was between $75-100 million dollars, not including marketing costs.

The marketing costs alone are staggering: According to a 2018 report, the budgets for certain titles could be as high as 75%-100 % of the development cost. This would effectively double the production cost. Twitch is one of the many channels that publishers use, and they will get a share. In recent years, we’ve seen a shift toward personality-based promotion, with more and more publishers eschewing traditional press at launch in favor of coverage they can control. Blevins is said to have commanded $1 million for streaming. Apex Legends, a game that’s popularity can be attributed to its enormous Twitch-focused launch.

Who is able to compete with the conditions created by all these factors? Giant publishers, mainly. In 2022, all 10 games that were the most watched on Twitch had regular updates and live-service. Costs go beyond just money. It is not just about money. Fortnite took off, developers at Epic Games said that they experienced months of crunch that required 70-to-100-hour weeks to produce that industry-shaping content despite the publisher’s deep pockets. That’s the model that a lot of this hinges on, an egregious work week that often still requires the cheap benefits of outsourcing and contractors who are routinely laid off. Things haven’t changed much since 2019 at some major studios: Diablo 4’s developers say they also underwent crunch to ship the game. The action-RPG had Twitch integrated from the start, along with a detailed roadmap of content. There’s little incentive for any of this to change, even as big-budget games buckle under their own weight and studios are closing left and right. Not when publishers know that the longer a player is hooked, the more likely it is that they’ll spend money.

Live-service games are now dependent on Twitch streaming content to remain solvent. According to a developer who spoke to Polygon about streamers, they help transform old games into visible and new moments. Live-service games are essential for developers to remain in the discussion, as the experience of the game can worsen if there is no persistent user base.

It’s “not even from a cost perspective,” the developer says, though obviously more players make profits more viable. “But [if] we don’t have 20,000 players, then matchmaking times are terrible. Or connections will be pretty bad because we can’t mobilize players together in a single match. There’s all these cascading effects.”

While a Twitch streamer’s livelihood depends on having a steady stream of content, the system taxes them, too. Tenney’s goodbye to his fans was a crushing one, because the path that led him there was fueled by lost youth and a dream. Over time, the promise of a dream job — get paid to play games! — became corporatized, and contracts turned things ugly. Tenney said he started feeling trapped, and he didn’t like how much his decisions started being motivated by money. Tenney is hardly alone here now that Twitch has “grown up.”

“There is inherently [a] vicious and negative cycle for everyone involved, for how live service interacts with Twitch as a medium,” the game developer, who also spent years as a serious Twitch streamer, says. It’s been years, but he says he’s still recovering from the burnout of livestreaming all the time.

“There [are] these enormous benefits for some people, but there’s also just, like, a lot of it just really grinds you down on both sides of the table,” he said, referring to game developers and Twitch streamers.

The burnout phenomenon has been at the forefront of Twitch’s public image, in large part because it doesn’t spare even the most successful creators on the platform. Twitch’s most famous woman, Imane “Pokimane” Anys, started streaming while she was still a teen. It was a mere hobby back then. Anys was one of most successful platforms on platform. A big change came about in late 2022. She announced to her fans that gaming would not longer be the focus of her life, and she wouldn’t stream every day. In her new role, she will be a beauty and lifestyle personality that uploads to short-form platforms, like TikTok.

The evolution grew from a similar motivation as Tenney’s. In the video where she explains it all, Anys said that during her time as a full-on Twitch streamer, keeping up with the “rat race” often meant playing what was popular while being unable to do “basic human things,” like going grocery shopping. She couldn’t, because streaming was the norm. And there were always younger competitors who would stay on the stream for longer.

Content creators are constantly feeling the need to continue creating content. Live-service gaming is always available. Anys gave a candid speech in her kind-of-goodbye Twitch video while scrolling quickly through her gaming history. All of the games were live-service. League of LegendsThe following are some examples of how to get started: Fortnite.

In 2011, when Twitch first launched, content creation wasn’t fully a career and people still uploaded their photos to Facebook. Normal, everyday teens weren’t yet decrying the hungry maw of the internet, and the generational shift toward work-life balance hadn’t yet taken hold. Twitch came along at exactly the right time. It benefited from an optimistic group of users who were familiar with the Internet and willing to offer as much information as they can. They didn’t even realize it was happening, in many cases, and they couldn’t imagine the unsustainable system it would go on to create. They were having fun.

Since then, things have changed. Twitch has crowned millionaires, like Félix “xQc” Lengyel, who wear thick diamond chains around their necks while streaming. While top creators stream less, viewers are dropping, despite years of growth on the platform, which was partly boosted by the COVID-19 epidemic. While the gaming industry likes to show off how much it earns compared to any other form of entertainment, top studios are cutting workers almost every week. The overall gaming industry is also shrinking. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the cracks that are appearing in the systems which produce and promote big-budget gaming.

“I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” Tenney said in his goodbye video, which is overflowing with footage of esports casters and viewers in awe of his Fortnite plays.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, man,” he continued, shaking his head. “I feel like my childhood and even some of my adulthood kind of flushed away. I feel like this is the end of the journey, man.”