You'd be surprised. My son, and the daughters of a friend of mine, have always preferred to watch me play games that they could play themselves: I'd happily ha

You'd be surprised. My son, and the daughters of a friend of mine, have always preferred to watch me play games that they could play themselves: I'd happily hand them the controller. In this case, their excuse is that I am better at the games than they are, so instead of being frustrated by, say, a Zelda puzzle, or some of the harder sections of a Mario game, they get to see someone that has been playing these games for over 20 years. When they see how much worse they are, they are just not mentally ready for doing so much worse. I get better results getting them to play simpler games: Less Mario, more Kirby. Now that they are old enough to be trusted with youtube, they watch people play in youtube, when they have the exact same game! Often the excuse is that if a part is boring, they can just skip to the next video, but when a game feels padded, they can't. If I was designing games today, I'd pay a lot of attention to this phenomenon: Before we had complaints of piracy, used games, rentals and such. Now, if your game is not any more fun to play than it is to watch, people WILL WATCH! It's very hard for That Dragon, Cancer, because it's more of a linear experience with limited gameplay than a traditional game: Watching and playing isn't very different. But going after the ads of channels that play your game is not impossible, and is probably their only choice, other than just being OK with people watching without paying.