The Fury said:
For the big games sure, many smaller games with fewer devs, story driven potentially by small studios reply on people buying the game. But this isn't just some board members or the owners of a company making month on their product and then paying employees for their work (it can come with bonuses for completing work and such alike or profits are even shared based on the company). It's streamers or content creators making money from someone else's work. It's why the debate of "Let's Plays" came up a little while ago and it's why if people on Twitch did a 'let's watch such and such a film together' something like that, they'd no doubt get shut down, banned or DMCA'ed. The game industry essentially let's people stream games because they know the benefits in the end but they also have the complete legal right (if they wanted) to one day just say "No, these are our games you are making money from, you can't stream them." and suddenly, no more Twitch. |
Streamers are creating value for their products, just like a marketing teams works to create the same value even though they don't code themselves
Nowadays movies can have higher budgets for marketing and promotion than for production itself, because movies depends heavily on traditional expensive channels such as TVs, newspapers and ads
Gaming industry is actually blessed to have streamers working for them for free, and making their OWN money, instead of spending gazillions of dollars a year on paid advertising
No wonder why gaming industry profit margins are much bigger than box office industry