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3 methodologies for automated video game highlight detection and capture
With the rise of livestreaming, gaming has evolved from a toy-like consumer product to a legitimate platform and medium in its own right for entertainment and competition.
Twitch’s viewer base alone has grown from 250,000 average concurrent viewers to over 3 million since its acquisition by Amazon in 2014. Competitors like Facebook Gaming and YouTube Live are following similar trajectories.
The boom in viewership has fueled an ecosystem of supporting products as today’s professional streamers push technology to its limit to increase the production value of their content and automate repetitive aspects of the video production cycle.
The largest streamers hire teams of video editors and social media managers, but growing and part-time streamers struggle to do this themselves or come up with the money to outsource it.
The online streaming game is a grind, with full-time creators putting in eight- if not 12-hour performances on a daily basis. In a bid to capture valuable viewer attention, 24-hour marathon streams are not uncommon either.
However, these hours in front of the camera and keyboard are only half of the streaming grind. Maintaining a constant presence on social media and YouTube fuels the growth of the stream channel and attracts more viewers to catch a stream live, where they may purchase monthly subscriptions, donate and watch ads.
Distilling the most impactful five to 10 minutes of content out of eight or more hours of raw video becomes a non-trivial time commitment. At the top of the food chain, the largest streamers can hire teams of video editors and social media managers to tackle this part of the job, but growing and part-time streamers struggle to find the time to do this themselves or come up with the money to outsource it. There aren’t enough minutes in the day to carefully review all the footage on top of other life and work priorities.
Computer vision analysis of game UI
An emerging solution is to use automated tools to identify key moments in a longer broadcast. Several startups compete to dominate this emerging niche. Differences in their approaches to solving this problem are what differentiate competing solutions from each other. Many of these approaches follow a classic computer science hardware-versus-software dichotomy.
Athenascope was one of the first companies to execute on this concept at scale. Backed by $2.5 million of venture capital funding and an impressive team of Silicon Valley Big Tech alumni, Athenascope developed a computer vision system to identify highlight clips within longer recordings.
In principle, it’s not so different from how self-driving cars operate, but instead of using cameras to read nearby road signs and traffic lights, the tool captures the gamer’s screen and recognizes indicators in the game’s user interface that communicate important events happening in-game: kills and deaths, goals and saves, wins and losses.
These are the same visual cues that traditionally inform the game’s player what is happening in the game. In modern game UIs, this information is high-contrast, clear and unobscured, and typically located in predictable, fixed locations on the screen at all times. This predictability and clarity lends itself extremely well to computer vision techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR) — reading text from an image.
The stakes here are lower than self-driving cars, too, since a false positive from this system produces nothing more than a less-exciting-than-average video clip — not a car crash.
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The China tech crackdown continues
The Chinese government’s crackdown on its domestic technology industry continues, with Tencent under fresh pressure despite the company’s efforts to follow changing regulatory expectations.
News broke over the weekend that Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent “over claims its messaging-app WeChat’s Youth Mode does not comply with laws protecting minors,” per the BBC. And NetEase, a major Chinese technology company, will delay the IPO of its music arm in Hong Kong. Why? Uncertain regulations, per Reuters.
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The latest spate of bad news for China’s technology industry follows a raft of regulatory changes and actions by the nation’s government that have deleted an enormous quantity of equity value. After a period of relatively light-touch regulatory oversight, domestic Chinese technology companies have found themselves on defense after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came after their market power in antitrust terms — and some of their business operations from other perspectives. Sectors hit the hardest include fintech and edtech.
Gaming is also in the CCP crosshairs.
After state media criticized the gaming industry as providing the digital equivalent of drugs to the nation’s youth last week, shares of companies like Tencent and NetEase fell. Tencent owns Riot Games, makers of the popular League of Legends title. NetEase generated $2.3 billion in gaming revenue out of total revenues of $3.1 billion in its most recent quarter.
NetEase stock traded around $110 per share in late July. It’s now worth around $90 per share after expectations shifted in light of the gaming news, indicating that investors are concerned about its future performance. Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed stock has also fallen, from HK$775.50 to HK$461.60 this morning.
Tencent tried to head off regulatory pressure, announcing changes to how it controls access to its games after the government’s shot across the bow. The effort doesn’t appear to have worked. That Tencent is being sued by the government despite its publicly announced changes implies that its proposed curbs to youth gaming were either insufficient or perhaps moot from the beginning.
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Can advertising scale in VR?
One of VR’s prospective revenue streams is ad placement. The thought is that its levels of immersion can engender high engagement with various flavors of display ads. Think billboards in a virtual streetscape or sporting venue. Art imitates life, and all that.
This topic reemerged recently in the wake of Facebook’s experimental ads in Blaston VR. As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney observed, it didn’t go too well. The move triggered a resounding backlash, followed by the game publisher, Resolution Games, backing out of the trial.
This chain of events underscored Facebook’s headwinds in VR ad monetization, which stem from its broader ad issues. In fairness, this was an experimental move to test the VR advertising waters … which Facebook accomplished, though it didn’t get the result it wanted.
VR advertising is a bit of a double-edged sword. It could take several years for VR usage to reach requisite levels for meaningful ad monetization.
Regardless, we’ve taken this opportunity to revisit our ongoing analysis and market sizing of VR advertising in general. The short version: There are pros and cons on both qualitative and quantitative levels.
The pros of VR advertising
VR advertising’s opportunity goes back to factors noted above: potentially high ad engagement given inherent levels of immersion. On that measure, VR exceeds all other media, which can mean higher-quality impressions, brand recall and other common display-ad metrics.
Historical evidence also suggests that VR could follow a path toward ad monetization. VR shows similar patterns to media that were increasingly ad supported as they matured. These include video, social media, mobile apps and games (just ask Unity).
To put some numbers behind that, 75% of apps in the Apple App Store’s first year were paid apps — similar to VR today. That figure declined to 15% in 2014 and hovers around 10% today. Over time, developers learned they could reach scale through free downloads.
Prevalent revenue models today include in-app purchases — especially in mobile gaming — and advertising. The question is whether VR will follow a similar path as developers learn that they can reach scale faster through free apps that employ “back-end monetization” like ad support.
This trend also follows audience dynamics: Early adopters are more likely to pay for content and experiences. But as a given technology or media matures, its transition to mainstream audiences requires different business models with less upfront commitment and friction.
“Today, there are only about 18% of applications in VR stores such as Steam and Oculus that are free,” Admix CEO Samuel Huber said. “This is fine for now because we are still very early in the market and most of these users are early adopters. They are willing to pay for content, just like they were willing to pay for prototype unproven hardware and generally, they have higher purchasing power than the average person.”
Drawbacks of VR advertising
Considering the above advantages, VR advertising is a bit of a double-edged sword (or beat saber). Those advantages are counterbalanced by a few practical disadvantages in the medium’s early stage. Much of this comes down to the requirement for scale.
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As Zynga impresses, rival mobile-gaming shop Jam City looks to list via SPAC
While it would be nice to write about something other than yet another tech company looking to list via a SPAC, the deals keep dropping, so our more traditional fare of covering startup trends will remain on hold for at least one day more.
This morning, we’re looking at the Jam City deal to merge with DPCM Capital. Jam City is a bit like Zynga, but unless you are a mobile-gaming aficionado, you might not have heard of it.
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You likely have not heard of DPCM Capital, either, but you know more about it than you’d think.
As Jam City notes in a release, the SPAC is “led by Emil Michael.” Michael is most famous for his time at Uber, where he served as chief business officer. He left the firm, as The New York Times wrote in 2014, after a board-called “investigation into [the company’s] culture and business practices” led to a “recommendation for Mr. Michael to exit Uber.”
He’s the gentleman who floated the idea of funding a team to “dig up dirt” on Uber’s “critics in the media,” as BuzzFeed News reported in late 2014.
Regardless, we’re not here to go back through Uber and its various cultural messes. We’re here to dig into the Jam City SPAC deck to see if the company is similar to Zynga. Why do we want to know that? Because Zynga has done great in recent quarters, including posting record revenue and bookings in the first three months of 2021.
With lots of folks stuck at home in the last year, gaming has done well in aggregate. And mobile gaming is a huge chunk of the larger gaming world.
More broadly, why do we care about Jam City’s SPAC transaction? Because the mobile gaming concern has raised more than $300 million, including a $145 million round in 2019 that TechCrunch covered here.
The company attracted capital from Austin Ventures, Netmarble, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase while private, per Crunchbase, so we’re very curious if Jam City has enjoyed a Zynga-like last few years and how it’s being valued as part of the SPAC deal. Let’s find out.
Jam City’s SPAC transaction
When Jam City raised that huge 2019 round, co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe said that the “global mobile games market [is] consolidating.” At the time, the company intended to use some of its new funding to acquire other mobile gaming companies.
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5 mistakes creators make building new games on Roblox
With Roblox’s massive IPO this month, game developers, brands and investors alike are wondering what factors cause the most successful games on this $47 billion platform to break out from the millions of user-generated passion projects.
According to Roblox’s S-1 filing, nearly 250 developers and creators earned $100,000 or more in Robux in the year through September 2020 out of nearly 1 million creators on the platform.
From Gamefam’s first game two years ago that topped out at only 25 concurrent players to our current portfolio with 2 million to 3 million daily visits, our team learned to develop on Roblox the hard way — by trial and error and by getting better at listening to the Roblox community’s unique gamer culture and vernacular.
Even the most experienced and talented game designers from the mobile F2P business usually fail to understand what features matter to Robloxians.
For those entrepreneurs just starting their journey in Roblox game development, these are the most common mistakes I have seen gaming professionals (myself included) make on Roblox:
1. Using the established free-to-play (F2P) mobile game mechanics
In the F2P mobile games market, it’s all about layered game loops: play a match with the hero, level the hero up using resources from the match, buy more heroes to merge with the first hero, open up new matches with new rules to win more resources, and on and on. These require ongoing player tutorials across hours of play sessions. These mechanics tend to backfire on Roblox because players have no tolerance for anything but immediate, visceral fun.
Accordingly, in mobile F2P, a robust tutorial for new users is oftentimes one of the biggest investments during development. But in our Roblox game Speed Run Simulator (more than 400,000 daily visits), we saw a significant increase in D1 retention when we removed the tutorial entirely and just allowed existing players to guide new players’ understanding of the game. The differences between Roblox and mobile F2P are not only numerous but also sometimes profoundly counterintuitive.
2. Optimizing to make money off of “whales”
Roblox players spend because they’re getting something they want. They won’t be cajoled or coerced into spending like in a mobile game where progress is restricted or slowed without making an in-app purchase (think Candy Crush).
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NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer new ways for consumers to collect, wear and trade fashion online, and now that most fashion shows have scaled back or gone virtual, they may become an important tool for the industry.
Because some of the most profitable NFTs are produced by celebrities with teams, it makes sense that music corporations, fashion brands and designers are venturing into the NFT market as well. Just this month, sneaker brand RTFKT Studios garnered $3.1 million in seven minutes by selling crypto collectibles. In December 2020, NFT startup Enjin partnered with Netherlands-based fashion house The Fabricant on a virtual collection. Real-life fashion brands use NFTs for marketing in virtual worlds like Minecraft, plus several Atari and Microsoft video games.
The fundamental value NFTs offer to bridge virtual fashion items with video games is the option to secure custody of the item for use in other games or mobile apps.
“Brands are coming up with some creative solutions because the pandemic is persistent, and fashion is something that is so close to our identities,” said Bryana Kortendick, Enjin’s VP of operations and communications. “You can snap a photo of yourself wearing your Atari-branded NFTs. You’ll also be able to wear them in video games.”
Breakout NFT star Beeple said he imagines a future where fashion NFTs could be redeemed for specific items in physical stores, especially at luxury retailers like his former client Louis Vuitton.
“You can relate NFTs to clothing in new and interesting ways,” he said. “This will be seen as the next chapter of digital art history. This is a continuation of digital art history that started decades ago, by that I mean art made on a computer and distributed through the internet.”
Fashion designers like Schirin Negahbani are already creating NFTs that represent actual clothing. Precisely because multimillion-dollar NFT sales are breaking records, spectators have been prompted to question the role speculative trading plays in this trend.
Textile designer Amber J. Dickinson says fashionable NFTs shouldn’t primarily be viewed as speculative trading opportunities. “The way I think fashion translates to the digital world is to view an NFT as a collectible piece of the garment for history,” said Dickinson, known for hand-made silk scarves and her work with Alexander McQueen. “I would only buy art as a piece that I liked. Whether digital or in the real world, I don’t take an investor’s point of view.”
There are many fashion fans who disagree with Dickinson, preferring to invest through assets like Birkin bags. They may have a different approach to NFTs. The DIGITALAX crypto fashion platform, for example, is being built with a plethora of trading features. As for Dickinson, she said she is still looking for her tribe of crypto-savvy artists on Twitter.
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