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The Almighty Buck Software Games Entertainment

Game Livestreaming Explodes, But Women Are Less Likely To Be Paid Than Men (venturebeat.com) 268

A new study by game research firm SuperData Research and payment company PayPal found that eSports and game videos are driving explosive growth in livestreams. But PayPal also found a gender imbalance in pay. Women are less likely to be paid for their streams than men. VentureBeat reports: PayPal said that 34 percent of livestream viewers in the U.S. have spent more than $50 on livestream content in the past few months. But despite the growth in spending, almost half of women content creators (43 percent globally, 47 percent in the U.S.) don't get paid for what they create. The U.S. had the largest gender pay gap of the countries surveyed: Almost half as many men (24 percent) do not get paid for content they create. Globally, active paying gamers polled shop across 14 different gaming platforms and nearly 30 different storefronts over the last three months, an incredible variety.

In the U.S., respondents surveyed purchased from 26 different gaming storefronts -- the third most in the world, behind Russia (27), and Australia and Canada (28 each). While Steam is highly popular among millennials globally (31 percent buy from Steam), GameStop was resoundingly popular, with 45 percent of U.S. millennial respondents reporting shopping there for gaming content. In most countries, in-game spending is within a few dollars of average spend on full games. Surprisingly, in-game spending is skewing higher among older U.S. players: those aged 35-and-over have spent $50 on average, compared to $40 for those aged 18 to 34. Meanwhile, younger gamers are spending more in full-game downloads: $63, versus $48 for gamers 35-and-over.

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Game Livestreaming Explodes, But Women Are Less Likely To Be Paid Than Men

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  • Is it that people prefer to buy content made by men over women? Do they know ahead of time who created the content or is it that somehow the content created by men is chosen more often without the buyer being aware of the creators sex? Is it that maybe women chose to give more free content away? The numbers in the article can be interpreted in many different ways depending on what other assumptions you make.

    • Its hard to not be aware of sex when 1/4 of the screen is streamers face.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Could just be that the content that the women are producing is less popular (and so less worth paying for).

      • Including in-game content the article talks about?

        • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @05:38AM (#56698012)

          The article is purposefully misleading and a click-bait/flame-bait pile of cr*p.

          It starts out saying waaah women paid less for their stream content, what this means is that out of all the 'live streamers' (twitch to you and me), people decide to not sub/dontate to female streamers because they play badly and/or are not entertaining, because 99% are 'tiddy bait'.

          Then the article switches into paying for game content of produced games as if the two aspects are somehow related and tries to trick you into giving credence to the worthless initial statement.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            because 99% are 'tiddy bait'.

            and those tiddy bait girls make lots and lots of money.

            • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

              and those tiddy bait girls make lots and lots of money.

              That shouldn't be a surprise, especially on twitch. A large number of mods and employees are fans and pay them. One of the reasons there was such a big backlash a few months ago against the creep of titty streamers into gaming channels and out of IRL, and an explosion of them using prerecorded game footage while shaking their bits on the screen.

          • A better comparison would be of girls that are 'tiddy bait' vs girls that actually play the games vs girls that don't need to put their face on the screen when playing.

      • You might be onto something. The closest thing to live streaming I've done is watching YouTube videos of people playing games, Factorio, where I want to see how they did something very specific. Katherine of Sky is one of my favorites because I find her voice soothing. But I haven't any idea what she looks like because all her videos don't show her face. https://www.youtube.com/channe... [youtube.com]

        If part of the screen is the woman's face then that's distracting because part of my brain will always notice an attractiv

    • I'm curious to what extent the data was analyzed. It seems like we've just been given a raw statistic as it just indicates the % of streamers who have never been paid, which outside of the U.S. isn't even that large. Like the pay gap itself, I wouldn't be surprised if after performing multivariate analysis or a linear regression that most of this gap disappears for the same reasons such as men streaming for larger amounts of time and game selection when streaming which likely contribute to audience size. I'
      • by jbengt ( 874751 )
        My thoughts are similar.
        If a very high percentage of the streamers are male, and very few streamers make real money, then those few top earners are probably male, and there is a good possibility that those few skew the averages.
        • This didn't even appear to attempt to do that, but as you point out, even if they had the result would be just as useless for the reasons you've described.

          All that I got from the shiny infographic was that they considered two pieces of data which were sex of streamer and whether the stream had received any amount of payment. Both of these are binary classifiers in this case. What I'm suggesting is that at a bare minimum there are other factors that likely influence whether you get paid beyond gender. A f
  • by arbiter1 ( 1204146 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @05:28AM (#56697976)
    A female streamer has 100x easier time growing a viewer base then any male streamer has and its pretty much a fact. So chances are they will likely get more in donations of subs then male will get.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      A female streamer has 100x easier time growing a viewer base then any male streamer

      How does that work?

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        How does that work?

        Have you entered puberty yet? It's very simple. Show lots of flesh, cash in on lonely male demographic. This isn't rocket surgery, you do understand the basic biology of men and relation to visual queues right?

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          So what arbiter1 actually meant was that women we are attractive and willing to trade off that, perhaps with revealing clothes or flirty chat, find it easier. Women who can't or won't do that don't get that advantage.

          • So what arbiter1 actually meant was that women we are attractive and willing to trade off that, perhaps with revealing clothes or flirty chat, find it easier. Women who can't or won't do that don't get that advantage.

            Correct, in the same way no heterosexual man, ever gets the advantage.

          • So what arbiter1 actually meant was that women we are attractive and willing to trade off that, perhaps with revealing clothes or flirty chat, find it easier. Women who can't or won't do that don't get that advantage.

            Let me fix that for you:

            So what arbiter1 actually meant was that women we are attractive and willing to trade off that, perhaps with revealing clothes or flirty chat, find it easier. Women who can't or won't do that, and all men, don't get that advantage.

            IOW, you're talking about an advantage that many women have that no man has - in what way is that an advantage to men?

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              It's not an advantage to men, I never implied it was.

              I was merely pointing out that the OP's statement is not correct.

        • Which part of: "they are streaming the action of a game they are playing" did you not grasp yet?

  • Of course... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RobinH ( 124750 )
    Who wants to watch a stream of Farmville, the Sims, or Bejewelled? (I kid, I kid!)
  • Maybe they just need better training [globallnews.com].
  • You mean game developers? Those are entirely different people.
  • Preferrences (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @05:47AM (#56698050)

    Newsflash: Men are less likely to be paid for webcam stripshows. See anyone complaining about that?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Stripping is primarily based around looks. Streaming video games is based around playing the game, community, chat, skill etc.

      • by halivar ( 535827 )

        If I was a cringey fedora-wearing neckbeard redditor, here is where I would say, "oh, my sweet Summer child" or some other edgy bullshit.

        Oh, wait, I just said it...

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        For someone that claims they watch streams, you haven't been paying attention very much to the gaming channel on twitch the last half-year have you? There's a reason there was a content creator backlash against the titty-streamers.

      • Stripping is primarily based around looks. Streaming video games is based around playing the game, community, chat, skill etc.

        And both types of streams are totally voluntary purchases. If female gamers' commentary and skill doesn't bring in donations whose fault is that?

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I don't disagree with you, but the issue isn't skill or quality of commentary necessarily. In other areas it's been shown to be less aggressive promotion and monetisation.

          That's something we might be able to look at and help with. I really don't see why wanting to understand the issue and offer helpful advice is such a problem.

  • It seems to contradict my personal observation. I know a few streamers and women seem to have a much easier time, provided that they are reasonably attractive. So, where is the catch?
    Maybe my observation are just annectodal? Maybe women are proportionally more likely than men to stream, men are more likely to stream only if they can make money out of it? Or maybe the study is flawed in some way.

    In particular, what is a "video game content creator"? Is anyone with a twitch account and a single video consider

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • provided that they are reasonably attractive. So, where is the catch?

        I just commented on this very thing above to another poster: from what I've seen, for men there is the middle-ground where even the ugliest man can still become quite successful, let alone the average-looking guy, but for women there doesn't seem to be such; either be attractive and have large tiddies, or fall to the rock bottom.

        That's because it takes skill/talent and/or power/influence for a man to convince many women to sleep with him. Women just have to say "yes".

        Men, as a group, have long since figured out that they better be able to provide society with something other than sex if they want society to value them. OTOH, women as a group, for all of recorded history, were considered valuable just for the sex they can provide.

  • by bistromath007 ( 1253428 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @06:08AM (#56698108)
    This could only have been written by somebody who barely even knows what streaming is. Almost everyone tries it at some point. The proportion of those who establish regular output is miniscule. Of those, the proportion that gets paid off either gender is half of a nothing. You know who does get paid, very consistently? Titty streamers. Everyone knows this. Twitch doesn't bother them because they're one of the biggest income streams. This shit is fake. It's propaganda, plain and simple.
  • by fazig ( 2909523 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @06:27AM (#56698158)
    This is usually a very important criteria when it comes to assessing a gender pay gap. So did they compare what kind of games the streamers played, what kind of commentaries they made while playing?

    Not all games have the same popularity among viewers. Sometimes it also counts who streamed what first. The commentary offered during streaming also seems to be an important part of this. From personal experience I know that some people have a knack for delivering entertaining commentary. I'm inclined to give them some money in exchange for their services. On the other side of the spectrum you have people who are downright annoying. If I had to give them money I'd do it to make them shut up and just play the game. But why pay them if you can close the stream instead? There's so much competition to choose from out there. At times it can't even be blamed on the individual streamer because some voices are more pleasant to listen to than others. But that's how the world of entertainment works.
    All important factors that have to be considered when disproving your null hypothesis here. So if there's a large overlap in content between male and female gamers, meaning that they play the same games and offer similar commentary, all while females get considerable less donations, then we'd have a gender pay gap here and may need to look into the causes for this. Maybe they did look for this, but I'm just incapable of finding it. I'd appreciate it if someone pointed me into the right direction here. Because without this due diligence has not been done correctly and makes it look like they jumped to conclusions.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This is usually a very important criteria when it comes to assessing a gender pay gap.

      You are confusing the gender pay gap with the equal pay gap. Equal pay for equal work is different to the wider issue of some jobs being dominated by one gender, particularly the better paid ones.

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        Maybe I do conflate those things. I've only seen those two things used interchangeably. What's the deeper point of the 'gender pay gap' metric if we do not also take a closer look at the work that has been done? At least to me the equal pay gap seems to be the much more interesting phenomenon to focus on.
  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @06:49AM (#56698230) Journal

    We JUST had this posted less than 24 hours ago?
    https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
    You're still posting politics / identity politics warfare here?

    When will you people get that the *vast majority* of what few remaining members you have on this site aren't interested in this. It's not relevant to this website or fitting to what people STILL COME HERE FOR.
    I'm not trying to oppress women, join an MRA group or any other such ridiculous thing, I just want to come here for absolute tech news and articles of interest, ideally which are logical, scientific and consistent, not stuff which is a matter of varying opinions on if they are true, or politically based.

    I'll take the bait though, I'll take it.
    Are you guys genuinely claiming that you think women streamers make less than men or are paid less?
    There could be dozens of reasons, let me list some.
    Women may be less likely to try streaming due to whining / abuse / harassment from some kiddies.
    Despite the pushy lying articles about video games, women are by far NOT 50% or over 50% of the market.
    Seeing as most people watching streamers are men, they may prefer to watch men, depending on type of humour, type of game played, perhaps itâ(TM)s just the dedication, men can be quite obsessive about things.

    Then weâ(TM)ve got my main point, the âboob factorâ(TM) thereâ(TM)s without a doubt a large consistency of very dull, very simple streamers who wear revealing clothing, play games, poorly, squeal now and then, âaccidentallyâ(TM) bend over in revealing clothing and they really are offering a lower quality product than many dedicated male streamers. HOWEVER they clean up, for obvious reasons (Sex sells)

    This is also bad for other women streamers who just want to play legitimately without using their bodies to get viewers, they get hassled by kids who think all women streamers are boobs out.
    To imply that this is as simple as just a plain sexism thing of man vs woman thing, is insane, the differences vary far more than just the bloody gender of the streamer.

    This political stuff needs to stop being posted here, itâ(TM)s ramped up IMMENSELY in the last 18 months and Iâ(TM)m seeing more and more pissed off Slashdot posters due to it.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Some of us are interested in this.

      Look, I don't get pissy when I see a story I'm not interested in, I just scroll past it. What is your problem?

      If you don't want to discuss it, fine, but there is no need to try to ruin it for everyone else. Be less of an easily offended snowflake and move on to the next topic.

      • If you're interested in this garbage, then fuck off to a heavily left leaning site or Twitter. Go seek out your political anger fuel for the day.

        Why should this site, which was rarely political be bombarded with these bullshit submissions of stuff likely to incite rage and frustration?

        This isn't what slashdot had ever been previously, why now do we need this shovelled down our throats?

    • In Germany the ratio between male and female gamers is pretty much 50 : 50. While there are games that are male dominated, there are other games, especially web based online games, that are female dominated.

    • We JUST had this posted less than 24 hours ago? https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] You're still posting politics / identity politics warfare here?

      Sure. You're still posting to them too.

  • by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @06:57AM (#56698268)
    Is this about streamers getting paid for playing video games or where people buy them? The excerpt is a mess - the first paragraph ends with a line from a separate paragraph in the article, making no sense whatsoever. Then it goes on to talk about Steam vs. Gamestop vs. in-game purchases?

    Granted, so does the original article, which also goes on to discuss esports as a monetization opportunity. So, the article itself is about three things, and in both the article and the summary, the gender-bias topic of the headline is actually the shortest part!

    I'm left to assume that the pay-gap component was slapped onto a rather dry piece about retail and esports in order to draw eyes.

    Also that the summary is a mess that needs re-editing.

  • I can't believe anyone gets paid for this shit. This is narcissists splatting their lame lives on the Internet for all to see. It's a way of boosting your ego through likes or thumbs up or +1s or whatever. Maybe women get more value out of the ego boost.

  • People searching click on the first results they find with the correct game name?
    Study why some content creators are getting watched.
    Is it new people finding the results? Returning viewers?
    Is it their skill? The type game they play? Their ability to talk well of a game and having a real understanding of related game history?
    An ability to encode their game play in a better way that streams to a more professionals standard?
    People just return to the first person they found in the past and like the
  • I don't see how this is really news. For the most part streamers rely on Twitch subscribers and Patreon donations. People support who they want to. You can't really force people to support creators they don't like so any disparity in income levels is simply market driven.

    And though I watch streamers of both genders, I actually watch more female streamers (and my Patreon support is about 70%/30% split between females and males, respectively). Still, who people choose to support is their own decision.

  • If I understand correctly, money comes from viewers, but how viewers know if the streamer is male or female? If they cannot, it means they discriminate just on the stream content, which suggests male and female play differently. This is an interesting point.

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