How Has Live Streaming Brought About More Cooperative Gaming Experiences?

It’s strange to think back to the pre-internet days when gamers had to predominantly play games on their own. Nowadays, nearly every sector of the gaming industry has a heavy focus on cooperative gameplay, and the social element of the industry is well and truly back.

Live streaming has been a game changer in the advancement of collaborative gameplay online, and it has proven to be extremely popular. This could pave the way for enhanced experiences in virtual reality in the future.

Live Casino Options are Popular for Their Social Elements

One of the first areas of the gaming industry to jump on live streaming was the online casino sector, with some sites offering this feature in the early 2010s. Most people credit Facebook with bringing the platform to the mainstream, but it began way before then. Live streaming offered players at home a chance to feel as if they were sitting at a real casino table, only separated from the dealer by the screen of a laptop or mobile.

This format of the game blew up over the last ten years, and now almost every online casino offers it. Indeed, it has become a major selling point, and casinos now gear their promotions towards it to allure players. An example of this can be found among the SkyCity online casino promotions, which include a live casino welcome offer of 100 percent up to $150. The operator clearly knows that a lot of people want to play these games, so enticing them with offers helps to draw them in.

Live casinos offer a social element, in that players can sometimes use a chat box to talk to other people and the dealer. There isn’t any collaborative gameplay involved, but it does provide a sense of community and can make people feel as if they are playing in a real casino.

Twitch Allows Viewers to Contribute to Gameplay

Around the same time as online casinos introduced live streaming, Twitch was beginning to make a name for itself for offering a similar experience. The gaming platform allowed people to stream their gameplay as a live broadcast, with other members watching and commenting on it. This created an interactive gaming atmosphere and allowed people from all over the world to collaborate on missions and battles, as we've reported here on Co-Optimus before.

The overwhelming success of Twitch was highlighted when Amazon bought it in 2014. According to The Heritage Foundation, the cost of the purchase was close to $1 billion. From that point, Twitch ballooned, and it is now one of the most popular sites on the internet, spanning way beyond just gaming.

Online games have always included cooperative elements, but live streaming has introduced another way for players to enjoy collaboration. It’s not always about everyone playing at the same time, with Twitch proving that a community can enjoy a game while one person holds the control.

These live streaming experiences have prepared gamers for a new way of playing, and this could be enhanced further when VR comes to the fore. Using that technology, all the people watching a game could be able to see it from the same perspective.