How Twitch Turned Video Game Voyeurism Into Big Business

Entertainment you dont understand is now a business too big to ignore.

- Felix Gillette and Spencer Soper

Kristen Valnicek stared at her computer in disbelief. She cupped her hands over her mouth and fell to her bedroom floor. “I can’t feel my body,” she wailed. Then she hopped up and started dancing. She looked back at the screen. “Oh my God, it’s real.” Someone with the username Andy, a fan she’d never met, had just given her a D—her shorthand for donation —of almost $7,000. “Mom!” she yelled. “I got the biggest D ever!”

Several months earlier, in early 2014, Valnicek had dropped out of the University of Saskatchewan, where she’d been an undergraduate studying accounting and law, to pursue a new kind of Internet career: playing video games for a live, online audience. Her father, a doctor, was ambivalent. Valnicek, whose bright green eyes and dyed black hair make her look like Shannen Doherty during her Beverly Hills 90210 years, pressed on. Soon, for three hours a day, five days a week, using the screen name KittyPlaysGames, Valnicek was streaming herself playing death matches in various games, most frequently Counter-Strike, a popular first-person shooter.