> Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started. Sure, there are people who are early adopters of anything, including plen

> Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started. Sure, there are people who are early adopters of anything, including plenty of things that never pan out. My mom certainly hadn't heard of Let's Plays in 2008, but she can name a few streamers now. To have predicted the success of Twitch is to say with a straight face that in the mid 2000s you thought that people who absolutely did not play games then (or even consider it) would regularly watch other people play games; Twitch probably has more concurrent users right now than there are people who had heard of a Let's Play before 2008[0]. To be clear, I'm not saying that you didn't predict it: I'm saying that realizing that Twitch would be as successful as it is today is uncommon. > The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes. Agreed. However, at the time the Washington Post famously opined on the Wright brothers that "It is a fact that man can't fly". A lot of the mockery they faced is probably apocryphal at this point, but certainly many people thought that powered flight was unlikely/impossible. Similarly, many of the early adopters of transistors were laughed at because vacuum tubes were the clearly superior choice [1]. My point here isn't that no one believed; some people have done a great job of reliably picking the right horse. My point is that for many innovative ideas, more people doubt than believe. And that (with the benefit of hindsight) it's easy to imagine you knew the right horse from the beginning. [0] https://kotaku.com/who-invented-lets-play-videos-1702390484 https://kotaku.com/who-invented-lets-play-videos-1702390484 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4XknGqr3Bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4XknGqr3Bo