“A Twitter feed of a college basketball game is like being in a room with 20 stoned Bill Waltons”
“A Twitter feed of an NFL game has become shoutcasting without the noise.”
In July 2016, Twitter announced a pair of deals with the National Football League and the National Hockey League to live stream a select number of games side-by-side with the Twitter feed of the game.
In term of business model, Bloomberg said that “the company will share revenue on ads that are sold alongside the content.”
However, Patently Apple was less enthusiastic, saying that ”Twitter recently beat out Facebook for live NFL streaming by conceding most of the TV ad revenue to the NFL in contrast to Facebook demanding total control over advertising.”
These deals are moves in the right direction for Twitter. Twitter at its best is a platform for real-time shared commentary of live TV events, especially sporting events, games if you will.
Real-time game commentary on Twitter is outside the game itself. The general term for this is “metagame” (after the Greek prefix meta- for “after” or “beyond.”
A college basketball game can be boring. But, it is never boring if Bill Walton is the color commentator. Bill Walton is metagame.
Insightful analysts of the now mature mobile game industry see the metagame as more engaging, and monetizing, than the games themselves.
For example, it is chat room strategizing among alliances ahead of battles (called “progressions” ) that is more engaging for players than the battles themselves.
It is watching and listening to esport live-streams of games on Twitch, with commentary by “shoutcasters”, that is far more interesting than playing the games themselves.
Jon Jordan, co-founder of pocketgamer.biz has written the most insightful stuff on the rising importance of metagame in the monetary success of mobile games.
Gabe Leydon, co-founder of MZ, credits the success of its top ranking games to metagame, especially an internal real-time, crowd-sourced chat translator build using the messaging language Erlang.
Here is a quote from a re/code video interview (5:14 – 5:48) with Gabe Leydon,
…”We really care about player-to-player interactions. From a content perspective, I don’t believe that I’m creative enough to come up with something that everyone will love. So, I create scenarios that people will play with each other. So, whatever they do with each other is far more interesting than what I could come up with.
“ We we have is a highly structured chat room.”
So Twitter gets that metagame has become as exciting and engaging as the games themselves. And that Twitter is in a better position than its arch rival Facebook to provide a REAL-TIME metagame platform.
But, in our opinion, what’s missing is the business model. It’s recent deals with the NFL and NHL suggest that it will get a very minor share of the native ads.
We have another idea: position itself to offer real-time, peer-to-peer sports betting — like overseas companies Betfair and BET365’s “Live Play.”
These are known as peer-to-peer betting exchanges with a real-time many-to-many messaging system as the platform. The business model is strictly fee-for-service. Both buy bets (bet to win) and lay bets (bet to lose) are allowed.
Betting exchanges are different from Las Vegas style bookmaking operations based on a traditional many-to-one client server platform. The business model is profit and you can only bet to win.
Interesting enough, the real-time messaging platform underlying MZ’s mobile games and chat translator is similar to the real-time, peer-to-peer betting exchange platform of Bet365, as both are based on Erlang, the programming language optimized for many-to-many “high fan-out” messaging.
Also, Twitter has a history with problems in scaling over the years with platforms based first on Ruby on Rails then moving to Scala. Maybe now is the time to look at what MZ and Bet365 has.
Twitter gets the metagame trend. Monetizing a metagame platform by linking it with peer-to-peer gambling would be amazing.