In a video interview with Gamasutra, Thimbleweed Park designer Ron Gilbert has revealed some insights on the benefits of streaming games. His comments come at an interesting time. Atlus has just set out a series of stipulations regarding the streaming of Persona 5, which include avoiding major spoilers and limiting individual broadcasts to a maximum of 90 minutes. At the same time, streaming giant Twitch just went live with its service for directly purchasing games from the pages of streamers, which funnels most of the profits to game developers.
In contrast to Atlus’ approach, Gilbert and the team appear ‘joyful’ over being able to witness how viewers are responding to other people playing through Thimbleweed Park. The dialogue tree strucutre of a point ‘n’ click game in particular means that viewers will be curious to attempt alternate solutions to the same puzzles:
“What you have when you’re doing streams is you want the streamer to do something in the game and then the people watching the stream going ‘oh no I think he should have done this’…If you’re [making] a linear narrative game, and it has enough depth to it, streaming becomes an advertisement for the game.”
Thimbleweed Park is out now.
Disclosure: Author supported Thimbleweed Park on kickstarter.