As Kano relayed it, Mikami’s view is that even if a player has already seen the ending on a stream, they should still want to go finish it themselves. For him, that gap matters, because a stream can’t fully transmit the tension, the skill involved, the feel of being in control, the space to experiment, or that last-second rush of scraping through a hard encounter.
Yuji Horii has voiced similar worries, going by Japanese-language reporting. The same coverage says Naoki Hamaguchi described it even more starkly, calling it a crisis.
The numbers make it pretty easy to see why people in the industry are paying attention. MIDiA says gamers now spend 8.5 hours a week watching gaming video, versus 7.4 hours actually playing. Twitch’s Q1 2025 viewership totals tell the same story from another angle: Counter-Strike led the pack with nearly 100 million hours watched, with League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, and Valorant right behind it.
That kind of data pushes the business toward stream-first discovery. And if you care about single-player games, it’s worth watching closely. Ampere’s Q2 2025 survey, which covered 34,000 players across 22 countries, found that 56% prefer single-player games. In the US, that figure climbed to 65%. In Japan it was 63%, and in the UK, 58%, again according to Ampere.
Meanwhile, Twitch viewership numbers show that God of War Ragnarok peaked at more than 480,000 concurrent viewers, while Baldur’s Gate 3 hit 3.7 million hours watched on launch day and reached a peak of 481,000 viewers. If you want to go further with it, you can follow the discussion in Japanese and in English-language coverage, though so far major Western developers and streamers haven’t said much.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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