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Audience-driven games are evolving entertainment


Games are being watched as much as they’re being played in the modern industry. Between the rise of the streaming industry and audience-participation titles, passive viewers are playing an increasingly larger role in the creation of games. In a panel at the GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming Summit, we heard from several experts on the role audiences play in interactive media.

The panel included Jacob Navok, the CEO of Genvid Technologies; Oliver Messenger, director of product management at Meta; and Matthew Ball, managing partner of EpyllionCo. Genvid published Pac-Man Community on Facebook Gaming last December.

Developers and platforms like Facebook Gaming are finding new interest in audience-driven titles. While it’s not exactly a new concept, it’s become more popular in the last few years. Navok said, “Over the course of the decade, we’ve seen gaming video radically increase in terms of usage numbers. In many cases, there are more people watching one of our games than there are people who are playing that. We want to allow for them to also be able to participate .. . How do we create an experience that is both entertaining from a lean-back perspective — I simply want to watch — but also the more you choose to engage with it, the more you enjoy that content.”

Messenger said that interactivity helps make games more inclusive. It accommodates those who want to engage with a title without necessarily playing it. “I think that blurring of playing and watching is incredibly powerful, for developers and also for communities as well. It opens up to a much broader set of people, titles. And creating titles that are just as much fun to watch as they are to play is evolving entertainment in line with what consumers increasingly want to do. These game titles, these experiences, are no longer confined just to the people that want to play them or those that want to go super deep. They’re now expanded to that pool of people and also the people that want to watch.”

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Watching, playing, and both

The panel also examined how Pac-Man Community was a great proof-of-concept for an audience-driven title. Audience members have the ability to create their own mazes and interact with the content creator who is streaming the game. Messenger said, “The interactivity part is key, because it’s not just this static watch — which you could argue is entertaining enough as it is. It’s the ability for people to go from watching to influencing and impacting a game, without having to play.”

Navok added that it’s important to have a platform with broad appeal. As Pac-Man Community is on Facebook, it’s easy for a large number of people from around the world to play and engage with it. “The ability for all of these people to play instantly on their device of their choice and be part of this larger community that is centered around the game is very exciting. Typically, you don’t expect that from a product that started as an arcade game.”

Messenger said the familiarity of the title also helped, as did the size of the community: “I think a lot of people came on and thought, ‘Great, I can play a really good-looking version of Pac-Man instantly.’ That in and of itself is high value. Pretty quickly, folks realized there was a fairly intuitive UI, but also through the community we’ve got there — the people playing it, the people streaming it, and the broader community we’ve got going on — that there’s a lot more to this. People would go from playing to ‘I want to play this game, but I don’t have time right now — oh, I can watch this now’. . . In a way, the community acts as a way for people to be educated on what’s possible and how things work.”

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