Film and TV adaptations of popular game franchises have gained credibility in recent years with a slew of both critically and commercially successful projects. Shows like Arcane (covered in Stream Hatchet’s Save Point 2024 report) have capitalized upon the depth of their worlds (League of Legends) to source interesting characters and unique premises. This then leads to a flurry of online discourse from fans of the series, particularly on live-streaming platforms where video games and passive viewing collide. But does transmedia make a lasting impression on audiences on live streaming?
Thankfully, a unique opportunity arose at the end of last year: A video game adaptation that covers multiple games, providing a chance to look at how different franchises are boosted by transmedia exposure even with identical launch dates. The adaptation we’re referring to is, of course, Secret Level: An animated anthology series covering roughly 15 different game franchises spanning retro and modern titles. The series launched in two halves on the 10th and 17th of December, making a weekly analysis of viewership between games more consistent.
In this article, we look at the performance of different game franchises boosted by the release of Secret Level, and whether the boost from a TV series’ or film’s release attracts permanent new fans via live streaming.
Secret Level Reinvigorates Game Franchises
Firstly, it’s worth establishing how Secret Level’s release boosted the featured games’ viewership. Looking at the sum hours watched of every game featured in Secret Level reveals a jump in weekly viewership of 63% from the week prior to release (4.6M hours watched) to the week of release (7.4M hours watched). There was a slight decrease in the second week of the show’s release down to 6.4M hours watched, but still a respectable amount. It’s worth noting that these figures exclude two key titles: Concord (which was pulled by Sony prior to the TV series’ release and Exodus which hasn’t launched yet.
While it’s hard to separate out confounding factors for every single title, it’s worth noting that Secret Level was definitely partly responsible for this boost as chat mentions for the TV series jumped 511% on the the day of the first half’s debut (before later hitting its peak chat mentions total on the Friday of that week). Additionally, it was viewers, not streamers, picking up on the hype for Secret Level: Airtime for all of the games stayed practically even with an increase of just 2.9% from the week before to the week of the debut. This suggests there’s room for streamers and brands to capitalize on hype for new shows like this by covering/sponsoring show-specific content.
Popular Retro Games and Games Suited to Live Streaming Get Extra Boosts
The overall view misses a key factor, however: Almost all viewership among Secret Level games is accounted for by Arena of Valor due to the dominance of the Chinese-published MOBA title on live streaming. To see how each game individually performed, it’s worth looking at fortnightly viewership for each game before and after the TV series’ debut.
Viewed in this way, 10 out of the 13 games analyzed saw a rise in viewership following Secret Level’s release, with Beat ‘em Up title Sifu having the largest jump of 1253%. Although the sample size is far from being robust enough to be conclusive, the huge variety of genres and ages of titles within the sample suggest that transmedia has a unilateral effect on boosting viewership that defies confounding factors.
Only three games actually dropped in viewership during the fortnight of the show’s release: Pac-Man, New World, and Unreal Tournament. While the reason for New World and Unreal Tournament’s dips are unclear, Pac-Man deserves a closer examination. The game actually picked up pace one week later than the other games, seeing a jump in weekly viewership of 1385%. This delay may have been due to people finally connecting the dots (pun intended) between Shadow Labyrinth (Pac-Man’s gritty reboot) and the TV episode.
Transmedia Can Create a Lasting Impact on Live-streaming Viewership
Zooming out a bit, we decided to test if this theory held true for a range of other games with popular film and TV adaptations. Six shows/films were selected, and the top relevant game in that franchise was examined by weekly viewership before, during, and after the media’s release.
5 out of the six titles (pictured above) saw a surge in popularity upon the release of their respective media, with Fallout 76 leading the pack with a jump of 322% weekly hours watched following the release of the Fallout TV series. The only exception to this rule was Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth which actually dropped 47% upon the release of the TV series Like a Dragon: Yakuza. In general, then, it seems that games are expected to get a boost on live streaming from the release of related media.
But, does this surge stick around? We compared weekly viewership from before the adaptation’s release to the week after to allow the hype to die down a bit. In these cases, only 3 out of the 6 sampled games still had a boost in viewership, which makes a supposed long-term effect dubious at best. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Tomb Raider both dropped in this analysis compared to their previously strong performances. It may be that these titles depend more on their characters than their worldbuilding, thus meaning there’s less content for streaming audiences to sink their teeth into (compared to epic sci-fi worlds like Fallout and Halo which can sustain a long TV series).
It’s this kind of snowballing interest that is leading publishers from Nintendo to CD Projekt Red to turn their valuable IP into media other than video games. While some games are less suited to the adaptation treatment due to the near absence of plot (e.g. Vampire Survivors), Secret Level proved that even these titles could benefit from at least short story-style adaptations or reimaginings (e.g. Pac-Man’s return to the public consciousness). As film and TV execs attempt to tie transmedia promotion into their franchise marketing campaigns, Stream Hatchet will be watching the effect on live streaming.
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