12 March 2014

Why Twitch Plays Pokemon Crystal Had Huge Drops in Viewers Number?

TPP start as a niche entertainment....

Even though the title ends with a question mark, I'm not asking question here.
But, before we start, let me give brief introduction on Twitch Plays Pokemon (from here on will be written as TPP).

Twitch is an online service to stream game related video live so people can watch it. In the middle of February 2014, a streamer from Australia started a stream unlike any ordinary stream. This stream played Pokemon Red via emulator on PC and have a unique twist. It's controlled by the viewer. The game is played by typing the buttons on the chat system (ie. 'up', 'a', 'start' etc.). This is basically a lot of people playing 1 Pokemon game in one gameboy at the same time. Imagine the chaos when thousands of people suddenly interested in this thing! Yup, the chaos was really chaotic. Red, the Player Character, were walking in circle, checking pokedex again and again, searching through his bag repeatedly, all because he was controlled by thousands of player. In addition to that, each input had a 20 seconds delay by design. It was so chaotic that Red looks like played by an incompetent toddler playing with his gameboy upside down to the point the streamer added a new mode called Democracy where the game will choose most inputted input instead of pick all the input (this called as Anarchy Mode). But, amazingly enough, the people, called Hive Minds, able to do it quite well, albeit the long time they needed to do a lot of stuff. The game swayed between Anarchy and Democracy according to the command inputted. Most people agree Anarchy is better but Democracy is needed on task that need high level of precision. Many gaming websites posted articles about TPP and gave it amazing coverage. Supported by amazing fan arts and fan created lores and memes, the viewers were a whooping 90k at one point! It had a stable viewers number until Red get into the Hall of Fame and roll the credits on March 1st, 2014.

This is what TPP looks like. This was taken earlier today when we beat Lance of the Elite Four in Pokemon Crystal.
That's some brief explanation. What I want to talk here is about the declining number of viewers lately from around 100k at it's peak to 'just' 10k by the time I write this. Please note that 10k is still a HUGE number of viewers. But still, the number of viewers drops so significantly that a lot of people are saying 'TPP is dead', 'This stream is dying', etc. What probably the cause? What happened that makes a lot of viewers leave the stream?

My theory is this. It's not 'WTF?! We have only 10k viewers!!' but in reality it was 'WTF?! We got 100k viewers!!'. Did you said 'huh?!' ? What I want to say is that the anomaly is not we have only 10k viewers, but it is really weird (and awesome) that we have 100k viewers.