The Good:
Warframe is a good solid game with it’s typical bugs, when I got over the overwhelming part of the initial start I learned what the game was about. I started at MR1(account was created in 01/03/2014 but didn’t really focus on playing until 04/23/2018)
I did the story and loved it, I love the game play of the game and the modes it has with the random pugs to friends who play as a team. The game is really grindy tho but the way you play this game it gives the grind a bit of fun as the maps is always different and the encounters will always be different.
The Twitch streams:
With in the past few months I have been listening to suggestions from other successful in community building
With some games there is a contradiction to twitch streaming as I see it as a catch 22 basically, I hear this often from streamers who stream for a living “stream what you like to play” and then i hear “don’t stream games that are a pitfall”. So yep that is confusing.
But these streamers got success for being them and in playing games they love in which pretty much not warframe or a game similar to it.
So the study begins:
So I became an affiliate, I didn’t rather ignore the catch 22 warning I rather embraced it as a study.
As I learned how to play Warframe with co-workers but rarely with the other communities I am with and it was hard to get into Warframe partners groups as well since they are always normally full.
With my progression with warframe I decided to stream it often and when I did that I’ve noticed the users who used to visit my stream every now and then decided not to show up anymore and my viewer count daily that I would get
So I was going wtf? As this is just another game isn’t it? I didn’t get this bad of viewership and / or the feeling like I just stopped streaming all together. I have been streaming 90% of my 80 login streak and the numbers didn’t change at all when I would stream Warframe.
Well for one I’ve noticed a pattern if you visit the game title on twitch you will see a few rows of high player viewer count and a sudden drop to 20 and below that stream Warframe often are not partners at all everyone above are.
So I have been digging a bit on how Warframe is being marketed as it just occurred to me recently that this is a free game and it’s main source of income is from the plat / prime sales. So it’s technically not free it is a pay2win game.
With Warframe, I kinda feel like it is an MLM(Multi Level Marketing) but for gaming, not to mention it is free to play. Moving forward hos is this bad thing? And why does it really hurt new affiliate streamers?
First of all, keep in mind of what is multilevel marketing? Well what is it?
Multi-level marketing is a strategy that some direct sales companies use to encourage their existing distributors to recruit new distributors by paying the existing distributors a percentage of their recruits’ sales; the recruits are known as a distributor’s “downline.” All distributors also make money through direct sales of products to customers. Amway is an example of a well-known direct-sales company that uses multi-level marketing.
So how does this work with Warframe?
Let’s say you visit a WF Partner stream and they invite you to play the game -> they give a link now you are invited as a peon user under the partner.
Example:
-> Warframe
–> WF Partner gets a % of all sales from the invited WF players
|— WF Player — WF Player
So a twitch streamer is trying to make it big but also driving as a leader and doing so dabs into sales of marketing schemes while also selling themselves with their own merchandise. This game to a streamer is a double edge sword.
Want to make a few dollars in playing a free (pay2win) game, just need
- A supportive community
- Meet the requirements to become partner
- Let the sales happen
So what does this leave me?
Recap of what kind of streamer I am
- I am a new affiliate
- Still trying to build returning users and a community
What happens when I stream warframe?
To be honest, it feels like I should not stream at all. I don’t get anything negative nor positive from it and it shows even by the twitch reports that my stream is pretty much stuck in the black hole and this is an over 3 month study.
What will I do now?
I am going to completely stop streaming Warframe, it’s not worth the time and effort as the community does not support newly affiliates (as it feels and shown) and that is sad because I like the game, it’s fun but I can’t keep showing my progression if I want to build my own little community and since I am NOT a WF Partner I am rather useless at least that is how I feel coming from the Warframe community as a whole as I don’t have the plat* giveaways to work on and I don’t have the money to support to buy a Warframe community just to work around to boost myself a quick community to get WF Partnership.
