Twitch Plays

The premise makes sense: if you watch people playing a video game via a Twitch live stream and enjoy what you see, you're more likely to buy that game and play it yourself.

Twitch, the popular game-streaming platform, now says it has statistical evidence of this "watch then buy" phenomenon.

"I found that when a Steam connected viewer watched a game on Twitch, their odds of purchasing the game within 24 hours went up substantially," Twitch data scientist Danny Hernandez wrote in a blog post this week.

By extrapolating some data on Twitch viewership, he claims that 25 percent of sales for Punch Club and The Calling were driven by Twitch. Tom Clancy's The Division, meanwhile, attributes just under 20 percent of its sales to the streaming platform.

Okay, you might be thinking, but what if these people seek out games to stream on Twitch that they are already likely to buy? Hernandez says the most compelling evidence that Twitch influences buying decisions has to do with game size: streams of indie games that people have never heard of have much stronger purchase numbers after they're streamed on Twitch than do major games.

"Mid tier" broadcasters, he says, convert views into purchases 13 times more effectively than top-tier broadcasters, and small broadcasters convert views into purchases 1,000 times more effectively than top-tier broadcasters. Overall, 46 of the sales attributed to Twitch come from broadcasters that average between 33 and 3,333 concurrent viewers.

While Hernandez's report is certainly self-serving, it's further evidence, if nothing else, of what many gamers already know: streaming services are now an important part of the gaming community. Of those services, the Amazon-owned Twitch is the most synonymous with game streaming, and its community is the most robust.