When Game Becomes Life

TLDR

Online gaming franchises generate massive user bases that engage in social interaction through gamecasts, a form of user‑generated content that attracts industry and academic interest but has been understudied compared to platforms like YouTube. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of gamecast sharing sites, focusing on commercial streaming platforms such as Twitch.tv and community‑maintained replay sites like WoTreplays. The authors compiled a novel WoTreplays dataset of over 380,000 replays from more than 60,000 creators and 1.9 million gamers, combined it with an existing Twitch dataset, and examined basic site characteristics and creator‑spectator activity patterns. Results show that both platforms are fast‑consumed, exhibit highly skewed popularity, and reveal distinct upload/download preferences—creators highlight individual skill while spectators favor team tactics—informing resource allocation and incentive policy design.

Abstract

Online gaming franchises such as World of Tanks, Defense of the Ancients, and StarCraft have attracted hundreds of millions of users who, apart from playing the game, also socialize with each other through gaming and viewing gamecasts. As a form of User Generated Content (UGC), gamecasts play an important role in user entertainment and gamer education. They deserve the attention of both industrial partners and the academic communities, corresponding to the large amount of revenue involved and the interesting research problems associated with UGC sites and social networks. Although previous work has put much effort into analyzing general UGC sites such as YouTube, relatively little is known about the gamecast sharing sites. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive study of gamecast sharing sites, including commercial streaming-based sites such as Amazon’s Twitch.tv and community-maintained replay-based sites such as WoTreplays. We collect and share a novel dataset on WoTreplays that includes more than 380,000 game replays, shared by more than 60,000 creators with more than 1.9 million gamers. Together with an earlier published dataset on Twitch.tv, we investigate basic characteristics of gamecast sharing sites, and we analyze the activities of their creators and spectators. Among our results, we find that (i) WoTreplays and Twitch.tv are both fast-consumed repositories, with millions of gamecasts being uploaded, viewed, and soon forgotten; (ii) both the gamecasts and the creators exhibit highly skewed popularity, with a significant heavy tail phenomenon; and (iii) the upload and download preferences of creators and spectators are different: while the creators emphasize their individual skills, the spectators appreciate team-wise tactics. Our findings provide important knowledge for infrastructure and service improvement, for example, in the design of proper resource allocation mechanisms that consider future gamecasting and in the tuning of incentive policies that further help player retention.