Siobhan Keogh: Is watching games as fun as playing?

A fan gets an autograph from Jason 'MANvsGAME' Love, right, as Love sits with Justin 'TheJustinFlynn' Flynn, second from right, at the booth for the online video game community Twitch'. Photo / AP

Why would Amazon - or any company - buy a company like Twitch for a billion dollars? It's not Twitter, or Snapchat, or any of those incredibly well-known technology startups that anyone who reads the news knows about. It's a highly niche video game streaming product.

Twitch is a bizarre thing. Instead of just playing games, you can sit and watch other people play games over the internet.

That concept in itself is hardly new - most gamers have, at some point or another, watched someone else playing through a game. Once, I had guests staying at my house but also had a very urgent review of Uncharted 3 to finish, so my guests essentially spent a whole Sunday afternoon sitting around watching, pointing out hidden treasures I'd glanced over and helping me solve puzzles. I kept apologising to my guests, because it's hard to explain to people that you know it's a video game but it's also work. But they genuinely didn't seem to mind - it was a fun game to watch.

There's also the fact that it caters to eSports communities in lots of ways - many of the top pro gamers are on there, streaming as they destroy everyone and everything in their wake.

So I sort of understood where Twitch was coming from before I tried it out, although I think there's a difference between hanging out with your friends and streaming your game to random people.

And then along came Twitch Plays Pokemon.

If you've never heard of Twitch Plays Pokemon, it's a stream on Twitch that lets you play collaboratively with loads of other players. Twitch has a chat function, where you can talk to the person who's streaming. Except in this case, that chat function wasn't going through to a person - it was going through to a program which took those chat messages as instructions. Essentially, people were controlling this Pokemon game, one move at a time.

If you've never played Pokemon, this is a game that can take 60 hours at the best of times. But when a stream gets nine million users accessing it at various points, and more than 1.16 million of them trying to make moves, things get messy. More than 50 million messages were sent in the stream's chat box. There was lag. Often the main character would end up standing in a corner, staring at the wall. It took 16 continuous days of gameplay for the game to be completed.

Twitch Plays Pokemon gained a lot of attention in the gaming press because it was just so strange. Maybe not half as strange, though, as Fish Plays Pokemon, where the moves made in Pokemon are dictated by where a fish swims in its bowl. (That's a real thing. Fish Plays Pokemon has been streaming for 32 days at the time of writing, and the fish wasn't looking like it was going to complete the game anytime soon. In fact, at this point it seems likely the fish will die first.)

This frame grab taken from Twitch.tv shows two gamers competing and a streaming chat, at right, as visitors to the online network watch the two gamers go head-to-head. Photo / AP

When you think about those numbers it doesn't seem quite so surprising that Twitch is worth so much money to Amazon. There are really clear, proven revenue and advertising strategies for streaming video services, especially those that can pull in millions of viewers and rabid fan communities.

But some of those fan communities might be none too thrilled with Amazon's plans for Twitch. While Amazon has insisted that Twitch will be run separately and nothing will change, it seems apparent that one thing already has. Ahead of the announcement, Twitch streams begun to mute any streams that might be playing licensed music. The problem with that, of course, is that there are a lot of games that have licensed music in them, such as the Grand Theft Auto series.

Why would Twitch enact this policy only days before the announcement that Amazon is going to be purchasing the organisation? I can only think of one good reason - to please their new Amazon overlords.

All that said, there are quite a few services that were bought by Amazon and are still great. Readers use GoodReads to source books and track their reading progress, The Internet Movie Database (more commonly known as IMDB) has hardly changed in years and years, and is a great resource for entertainment fans when it's award season.

Maybe all hope is not yet lost for the service that brought gamers together to play a game that was released on the 90s. But if I were a popular Twitch streamer I'd be a wee bit nervous.