It's not just kids.

You can look at e-sports to find a similar theme. E-sports events now have 10s of millions of live viewers watching a single match that might have 10 players.

How many people watch the Superbowl compared to the number of people who buy footballs and go play with them outside?

How many viewer-hours are spent watching the Travel channel or consuming travel media (video, TV shows, blogs, etc) compared to the number of hours spent traveling?

What we're talking about is spectatorship. Spectatorship is nearly always an order of magnitude more popular than participation, because the barriers to entry are lower, because it's cheaper, and because humans are lazy and it's easier.

Organizations like the NFL make more of their income through advertising, merchandising, etc. than they does through ticket sales, why should video game direct sales vs spectatorship-related income be any different?

Let's plays could be seen as the viewer watching the Superbowl at home, while buying the game yourself is like being there in the stands or buying a football and playing yourself.

I don't blame primary content creators (game studios) for trying to capture some of this secondary/indirect market (re-streaming of the game / spectatorship). It's proving to potentially be a much larger market.

In some cases, my teenage (17) sister has told me she'd rather watch the Let's Play then play some titles, even if she has the time/opportunity to play them

I don't think 'kids' obsess so much over Let's Plays as they do over the characters doing the playthrough (piewdiepie, whoever else is big, etc).

You're ten. You don't have a debit/credit card. You can't buy games on Steam. Even if you could, your parents might not even let you play them (GTA, Fallout 4, etc).

But you have a smartphone with a 4k display, and probably access to an iPad, and certainly a laptop at your disposal, and all you need is a browser to access Youtube. So you watch games instead.

You don't care much about immersing yourself in the game's world, you care about the guy screaming "oh my godddddd!! what the shiiiiiiiit!" and making comments that ten year olds find funny.

I don't think this equates to "kids will never play games when they grow up since they are so used to watching them instead." Eventually they grow out of this phase and play games like mature people do.

Of course, that only covers the "Youtube Personality" clique of Let's Plays. I myself watch narrative and immersive Let's Plays for games I certainly don't have the time or money to play anyway (Firewatch, a bunch of indie horror games I'm too scared to play, etc).

I, a 37 year old man, had heard of infamous 2nd son but don't have a playstation.

So I googled a let's play just to check out the gameplay, intending to watch 5 minutes, and ended up watching pewdiepie play the whole game.

Be as disdainful and insulting all you want, but I found him funny, charming and thoroughly enjoyable, it let me watch the story like a film, but with a touch of the camaraderie of playing a game with friends like I used to when I was younger.

It's worth noting that the Let's Play folks actually add something to the experience. I'm not much of a watcher, but I started watching vegeta311 play Dark Souls on youtube, and before I knew it, 6 hours had passed. I was amazed at the guy's seemingly-casual skill - I'd sunk many hours into Dark Souls, but it was the skill I was watching for, not the game.

You'd be surprised.

My son, and the daughters of a friend of mine, have always preferred to watch me play games that they could play themselves: I'd happily hand them the controller. In this case, their excuse is that I am better at the games than they are, so instead of being frustrated by, say, a Zelda puzzle, or some of the harder sections of a Mario game, they get to see someone that has been playing these games for over 20 years. When they see how much worse they are, they are just not mentally ready for doing so much worse. I get better results getting them to play simpler games: Less Mario, more Kirby.

Now that they are old enough to be trusted with youtube, they watch people play in youtube, when they have the exact same game! Often the excuse is that if a part is boring, they can just skip to the next video, but when a game feels padded, they can't.

If I was designing games today, I'd pay a lot of attention to this phenomenon: Before we had complaints of piracy, used games, rentals and such. Now, if your game is not any more fun to play than it is to watch, people WILL WATCH!

It's very hard for That Dragon, Cancer, because it's more of a linear experience with limited gameplay than a traditional game: Watching and playing isn't very different. But going after the ads of channels that play your game is not impossible, and is probably their only choice, other than just being OK with people watching without paying.

> "Eventually they grow out of this phase and play games like mature people do."

I don't know. I know several adults who watch countless hours of Let's Plays but don't actually play anything at all.

I guess at 28 I'm already very old. I can't for life understand this phenomenon. I avoid Let's Play, just like I prefer to watch movies alone (or with friends who know they should shut up during a movie) - because the commentary of another person is distracting from the experience. It kills immersion.

Videogames have the ability to deliver as much (if not more) of a serious emotional experience as movies and books. Is this Let's Play trend implying that kids no longer care about actually experiencing the game?

It's not just games. My 5yr old is perfectly happy to watch videos of other kids opening and playing with toys.

Thinking back on my other kids at that age, I'm not sure if the 5yr old understands that the play is happening someplace else. It's as if they are right there, playing and having fun with the kids in the video.

South park... I fondly remember having time in my life to watch television :/

I'm not a kid, but I still watch some Lets Play once in a while, because I don't have much time to play computer games myself and it's still interesting how once loved franchises change over time (i.e. Fallout series).

Are these people that would really be playing the game normally though? The barrier to entry to watching a lets play and buying and completing a game are miles apart.