Do Suspense and Surprise Drive Entertainment Demand? Evidence from Twitch.tv

Abstract

We measure the relative importance of suspense and surprise in the entertainment preference of viewers of Twitch.tv, the largest online video game streaming platform. Using detailed viewership and game statistics data from broadcasts of tournaments of a popular video game, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, we compute measures of suspense and surprise for a rational Bayesian viewer. We then develop and estimate a stylized utility model that underlies viewers' decisions to both join and to leave a game stream, allowing for a differential effect of suspense and surprise on these decisions. The estimates reveal that suspense enters the consumer utility but provide little evidence of the effect of surprise. The magnitudes imply that a one standard deviation increase in round-level suspense decreases the probability of leaving a stream by 0.2 percentage points. Consistent with the observation that only current viewers of a game observe the amount of suspense and surprise revealed in the game, we find no detectable effect of suspense and surprise on the decision to join a game. In a simulation exercise, we show that a change in game's realized suspense explains 8.1% of the observed range of the evolution of streams' viewership levels. Our results provide a general tool for content producers and platforms to use when designing and evaluating media products.