> ...I believe that they are damaging their reputation and lose trust, not only with content creators,
Twitch streamers can generally go pound sand. Most of the professional streamers that I'm aware of are all cut from just about the same mold... and I _get it_ -- most of them are running a business that depends on establishing and maintaining parasocial relationships with a ton of people... but just because a business makes money doesn't mean that it's a good business to have in operation.
> ...but with the players as well.
If there's one thing I've learned in my many, many decades stomping around, it's that it's impossible to please everyone... and if you try to, you'll almost certainly never produce something that's worth people's attention.
Nintendo and Zelda are household names. The Switch is good hardware, and -historically- Zelda games are good games. The number of folks who would have purchased the game, but didn't because their favorite streamer(s) didn't play it on-camera is guaranteed to be insignificant in the first year, and drop to effectively zero as the years wear on.
Nintendo is massively profitable, and has been doing this sort of thing (both toy production and exercising substantial control over the public performance of the same) for _ages_. They're certainly not going to lose anything significant by doing this, because -historically- they haven't lost anything significant by doing this.
> The number of folks who would have purchased the game, but didn't because their favorite streamer(s) didn't play it on-camera is guaranteed to be insignificant in the first year, and drop to effectively zero as the years wear on.
This seems completely and obviously wrong to me.
As long as Nintendo spends even a cent on ads (they DO spend in fact more than 500M USD/year on marketing), it is very obvious that media presence has a very significant, non-zero effect on their sales.
Is one view on a youtube stream for breath of the wild worth as much to them as an average ad-impression they paid for? Probably not. But it's MOST CERTAINLY not worth 0. Thats just not how advertising works, and pushing that argument seems misleading and dishonest to me.
People don't even need to CONSUME the content-- just having it pop up on some feed might be enough to sway 1/10000 towards buying a Nintendo game the next time they're bored. Or need a gift.
I remember showing Zelda BotW to my nephew. We played it a few hours and even though he had fun with it, he had no interest in playing or buying it for himself. Then one of his favorite streamers picked it up on their channel and now he's running around with Zelda hoodies, spent several hundred hours in-game and is desperately awaiting the new Zelda release.
So yeah, I agree, and I have absolutely no idea how people are still underestimating the influence those streamers have (especially on teenagers).
Twitch streamers can generally go pound sand. Most of the professional streamers that I'm aware of are all cut from just about the same mold... and I _get it_ -- most of them are running a business that depends on establishing and maintaining parasocial relationships with a ton of people... but just because a business makes money doesn't mean that it's a good business to have in operation.
> ...but with the players as well.
If there's one thing I've learned in my many, many decades stomping around, it's that it's impossible to please everyone... and if you try to, you'll almost certainly never produce something that's worth people's attention.
Nintendo and Zelda are household names. The Switch is good hardware, and -historically- Zelda games are good games. The number of folks who would have purchased the game, but didn't because their favorite streamer(s) didn't play it on-camera is guaranteed to be insignificant in the first year, and drop to effectively zero as the years wear on.
Nintendo is massively profitable, and has been doing this sort of thing (both toy production and exercising substantial control over the public performance of the same) for _ages_. They're certainly not going to lose anything significant by doing this, because -historically- they haven't lost anything significant by doing this.