3 Ways In Which Streamers Have Actually Ruined the Gaming Industry
While video games have been dealing with leaks for a long time, it is now evident that streamers are responsible for ruining games in different ways.
- Video game leaks are creating troubles for almost all big releases.
- These leaks are often done by streamers and they sometime stream unfinished builds ahead of the game's release.
- Aside from leaks there are other factors impacting the games negatively in recently times.
Video game leaks are severe issues that the gaming industry has been dealing with for years now. As the gaming world expands with new developers and new-gen gamers joining the universe, leakers are also eventually making their way to a much-increased number, which is posing a threat and ruining loads of games. Most of these leakers are actually game streamers.
Live streaming is one of the fastest-growing professions gamers choose to use their passion to earn money. Up to that part, things were totally alright, but the issue began as some of these streamers chose unethical means to leak upcoming games and mostly ruin the efforts of the developers.
Streamers Have Been Leaking Games That Completely Destroy the Excitement
The moment a developer team starts working on a game, it has a complete strategy regarding the publicity of that specific game. With trailers and sometimes with X (formerly Twitter) posts, they interact with the audience to build the hype strategically by showing them the best parts the game is about to bring.
This eventually makes the gamers interested in the game. However, in the last few years, the scenario is rapidly changing, with leaks coming out and affecting almost all the big releases. After some big leaks landed in 2022, which affected Ubisoft’s one of the best franchises, Assassin’s Creed, and Rockstar Games’ GTA 6, in both cases, video files leaked on the forums.
In 2024, a lot of games have faced this same thing. Take the example of Space Marine 2. A few months before the game was released, leaks surfaced that allowed players to play some unfinished builds of the game. Though in most cases, these leaks come from anonymous sources, in some cases, streamers are totally involved in everything.
This involvement is nothing new. Developers often push test builds to streamers and other external agencies to get their reviews, and sometimes streamers violating the rules stream these test builds. Often they collect unpublished builds of games from sources to stream them ahead of time. Though almost streamers on all the platforms do these things, Twitch streamers are notoriously renowned for doing these unethical things.
A glaring example of this recently surfaced when Nintendo sued a streamer for streaming two of its games before they were officially released. Despite this, it probably won’t stop anything, but it once again pointed out that streamers sometimes go beyond boundaries and destroy the fun of video games.
Streamers Often Switching The Fun of The Game With The Money They Earn
Games are primarily a way to relax and have some fun, either solo or with friends. At least that was the concept of gaming when the trend began. However, if you take some recent examples, you’d rather see players have been grinding games for money and not for fun and that’s a thing that streamers have initiated.
You don’t need to go far as you can find a suitable example if you take the peak time of Fortnite and Call of Duty. Initially, both these games were made to enjoy the thrill of battles. Especially when it comes to Fortnite, the game was designed in a way that even kids could play and enjoy.
However, when in 2018 the game reached its peak, it brought Twitch streaming which eventually brought to light that games can be played for money. It has generated a trend of streaming games to make money and not to enjoy the gameplay. The scenario was the same with COD games as well. That’s exactly where streamers started ruining the fun of the games.
Leaving behind the enjoyment a game can provide, players started competing to get top spots and most importantly, they didn’t care to use unethical means to eliminate others for that. That’s because the more content one can have, the more views will come and the amount of money will be increased.
Streams Often Affect The Pre-Order Stats and Revenue Of the Games By Revealing Important Moments
We are not against streamers. Streaming is a good way to get an idea of a game. That’s where the problem lies. Sometimes, even before a game releases, streamers show all the thrilling and twisting moments of the game that were the USP of the game. Once players get to know all these things naturally they get less interested in spending money on that specific game.
On the other hand, sometimes, these streamers even make videos on the most catchy parts of the game to make it boring for players. For example, even before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was released, there were loads of videos on the best loadouts for the weapons.
Finding the best loadout for each weapon is one of the most challenging things in the game, and this requires players a lot of grinding, but the moment you get to know what exactly you need to find, the excitement is wasted and the game starts feeling boring.
Aside from that, sometimes, these videos have comments on the gameplay that influence the thoughts of players mostly in a negative way. Hearing some negative remarks, especially from renowned streamers often affect the sales of the game, at least initially.
With these factors actively impacting games before and after release, the fun of playing video games is gradually turning into competition and negativity.
