2018 Proved Game Streaming Can Still Get Bigger—and Messier

It's almost 2019, and I'm still not sure where streaming is going.

In March, popular Fortnite streamer and no-talking-to-girls-er Ninja invited the rapper Drake onto his stream, and racked up 1.5 million viewers in a record-setting display for Twitch, the biggest streaming platform in the videogame world. It was such a watershed event that many observers marked it as the moment livestreaming finally became so inextricable from the mainstream that one could say, finally, the medium had arrived.

Want more? Read all of WIRED’s year-end coverage

Nine months later, it's easy to both agree and disagree with that statement. On one hand, absolutely, yes, streaming is huge—big events are bigger than ever, and Ninja in particular has parlayed his broadly inoffensive Fortnite bro routine into a bit of traditional media fame, complete with a legitimately charming Ellen appearance. Rappers and other celebrities guesting on streams isn't an uncommon occurrence anymore, and in the span of less than a year videogame streaming has become a major component of modern media diets.

And yet. Streaming sites, and the online celebs who both monetize and legitimize them, are as marred by controversy as they always have been. Racial slurs are upsettingly common—even Ninja let one slip on his stream the same month he rocketed into the mainstream. (He apologized, claiming he had merely fumbled the lyrics he was trying to recite.) Major YouTubers/streamers like PewDiePie are accused, justifiably, of helping to prop up alt-right media makers by offhandedly recommending their work in their own creations. At its worst, streaming can be a center for harassment and SWATing.

From a critical remove, then, streaming is a strangely liminal space, one not yet secure in its place in the media landscape. It's a land of opportunity and nonsense, a media format beyond its Wild West stage yet not quite formed into something that can be subjected to mainstream media analysis. Streaming is a place for big-time, multi-million-dollar celebrities. It's also a place where marginalized people form communities around games and people they love, where niche gaming communities like speedrunning can grow healthily.

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But what does all of that mean, exactly? What can we, as viewers and critics, take from streaming in 2018? Well, the first lesson is not to force streaming to fit into a convenient media narrative. Streaming is an amorphous platform for expression, one that grows constantly. It's a place where people go to watch other people play and talk about videogames, but it's also a place where people talk about their lives, or watch TV shows together, or showcase how good Drake is at building forts. It's not a space that can be safely pinned down. At least not yet. Maybe not ever.

Another lesson is that streaming is not done growing. In fact, it's probably just starting. My biggest streaming prediction for 2019 is it will continue to become a site for major commercial exploitation, celebrity streaming, and that viewer counts will grow even larger. And as it grows, streaming will continue to morph, with creators finding new, inventive uses for platforms like Twitch.

I also suspect that the darker aspects of the streaming space will become a more glaring problem, and that platforms like Twitch will strive to sand down the rough edges of the scene. They've already started heavily restricting adult content (a move that would make Tumblr proud), and are working exceptionally hard to draw a clean line between the family-friendly offerings on a site like Twitch and streamed sex work. At some point, Twitch and platforms like it will have to reckon with the questionable community spaces they've created, and as these spaces become increasingly mainstream, that reckoning only gets closer.

What is streaming, then, in 2018? It's hard to say. And in 2019, answering that question won't get any easier.