Behind the game: Exploring the twitch streaming platform

Twitch is a streaming platform that lets users broadcast their screen whilst playing games. People can share their game experience and interact with others in real time. Twitch has now become the fourth largest source of peak Internet traffic in the US. This paper explores the unique nature of this platform over a 11 month dataset. We find that Twitch is very different to existing video platforms, with a small number of games consistently achieving phenomenal dominance. We find a complex game ecosystem combining consistently popular games over years, newly released games enjoying bursts of popularity, and even old games appearing on the platform. Despite a strong skew of views across channels, the top ranked channels, although taking a significant share of the viewers, exhibit unexpectedly high churn. The reason behind this churn lies within another unique feature of this ecosystem, namely tournaments, live events that last for a limited amount of time but are capable of attracting a huge share of views when they take place, as well as dominate the views of the related games. Overall, our work reveals a complex and rich ecosystem, very different from existing user generated content platforms.