I kind of equate todays gaming streamer to yesterdays garage band. I’m not really a big fan, but many people are.
I feel like gaming is worse now than it was even 10 years ago when less people paid attention to streams or got their opinions straight from streamers.
Has streaming helped ruin or negatively impact gaming in your opinion?
They allow people with no thoughts of their own to make arguments on the forum.
A lot of people on these forums don’t like streamers yet seem to constantly know what the streamers are talking about lol.
Weird.
Not at all.
Streamers provide an insane amount of background noise/random chatter to listen to while I’m in the game doing my chores/busywork/etc
My list of “followed” streamers is steadily growing and I’m always on the lookout for new streamers to add 
The “non-gaming” streamers/talkshow hosts are also a big part of my entertainment as far as background noise goes. There’s a lot of interesting guests on some of these shows, it’s good stuff 
Streaming and YouTubers are good for introducing indie companies to an audience they’d mesh with. I’m not sure how well a franchise like Five Nights at Freddy’s would have done without streamers or YouTubers like Markiplier.
I wound up buying all of the Telltale Walking Dead games because I wanted to see what other branching story points a YouTuber didn’t cover. That said, I don’t really watch streamers. I’d rather just play games myself. But they do definitely cause an impact with indie game companies.
So many group thinkers, hardly any individual thinkers anymore. Most that say they are are pretenders.
As someone who is not a streamer but played collegiate esports on scholarship, i’d say twitch and esports haven’t ruined gaming they’ve just changed the focus on it. If that’s for better or worse is up to your taste. Many of the main-stream multiplayer games design balance and mechanics around being competitive as possible and are balanced based on the top 1% of players, not casual 1 hour a night bob. Its a tough problem because the top 1% players fully understand the game and have perfect mechanics, balancing around them makes sense on paper as they are ‘playing correctly’. The problem is the majority of the player base is casual bob who just plays for fun with his friends, doesn’t have perfect mechanics or strategies, and thus many things regarding balancing can actually be bad or seen as not fun by this type of player. Unfortunately unlike in real life where sports leagues where college athletes are separated form highschool athletes which are separated from recreational pickup leagues, this doesn’t happen well in gaming. Because mmr systems are hard to get right as well as the high amount of smurfs in any esport type game, casual bob and top 1% guy get put into the same lobbies quite often. This leads to casual bob and his friends getting burned out because what use to be more of a stress free hobby is now spent getting destroyed by people named things like GodTTV and Notasmurf.
It’s no different. We just went to EJ, blogs, and YouTube for opinions before the streamer days.
I liked gaming better when it was mostly a bunch of sweaty nerds.
People with completely self-absorbed and bias opinions attempting to use their influence to convince others that it’s a global opinion and what’s “right”?
Nah, can’t be bad.
Given how little there is on TV these days, YouTubers/streamers are about all I watch. And are far more entertaining.
The problem is, those who hive mind based off of the words of one streamer would do so regardless of if it was a person, a blog post, a recorded video, even a Tweet (or a Tumblr post, a 4chan post, a Reddit post, etc) because they have that mentality of seeking out those who share their opinions. We see it outside of gaming as well. Some people just seem predisposed to looking for like minded individuals to hive mind with rather than consider critical thinking or finding something in the middle.
I don’t think they have an impact on the game, just the forums, because people keep making threads about them.
I’ve been playing for 17 years and I can name two and the only reason I can name them is because like I said, people on the GD won’t stop talking about them.
this
like old people who hate changes just because it is different than what they are comfortable with
You could argue the pros and cons of streaming, so I’ll name a few positives that improved the industry:
I get that streamers can be annoying, but streaming as a whole has been great for vidya.
This is patently false though. These people make tier lists that are seen as gospel.
The money being made by companies made gaming mainstream long before streamers came around in substantial numbers.
Tier lists of what exactly?
I don’t know but apparently I should since it impacts me.
I don’t really watch streamers. I may see some of their videos on youtube when searching certain things. I’ve seen some of asmongold and belular, that’s about it and I was searching specific information.
I think streamers can be helpful in giving an overall voice to a large part of the community. They can bring awareness on a larger scale than just the forums. Problems players have with the game, the streamers may have the same problems and it gives everyone a way to get it out there to more people and discuss it and hopefully the devs can have things put into more perspective and they can watch a short video rather than comb through thousands of forum posts. It has its uses when it helps bring problems to a larger audience. It’s not good though when it’s just complaining to complain. It needs to be constructive.
For a lot of us older folks it’s kind of insane, and in many ways it’s a fulfillment of a childhood dream to run your own TV show.
There was a thing called “public access” tv that would air your own shows if you had AV savvy friends who could help you put something like that together. The best example I can think of would be the old Wayne’s World skits from Saturday Night Live.
Streaming is the ability to do something you’re good at like playing a video game and actually getting people to watch you play the game and interact with you through chat like a live audience. It’s really cool from that perspective.
And of course if you’re good at it you can get a whole bunch of money and fame from it as well.
Streaming isn’t going anywhere.