It's not just kids. You can look at e-sports to find a similar theme. E-sports events now have 10s of millions of live viewers watching a single match that mig

It's not just kids. You can look at e-sports to find a similar theme. E-sports events now have 10s of millions of live viewers watching a single match that might have 10 players. How many people watch the Superbowl compared to the number of people who buy footballs and go play with them outside? How many viewer-hours are spent watching the Travel channel or consuming travel media (video, TV shows, blogs, etc) compared to the number of hours spent traveling? What we're talking about is spectatorship. Spectatorship is nearly always an order of magnitude more popular than participation, because the barriers to entry are lower, because it's cheaper, and because humans are lazy and it's easier. Organizations like the NFL make more of their income through advertising, merchandising, etc. than they does through ticket sales, why should video game direct sales vs spectatorship-related income be any different? Let's plays could be seen as the viewer watching the Superbowl at home, while buying the game yourself is like being there in the stands or buying a football and playing yourself. I don't blame primary content creators (game studios) for trying to capture some of this secondary/indirect market (re-streaming of the game / spectatorship). It's proving to potentially be a much larger market.