[emacsen]

This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.

It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.

The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.

A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].

Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.

[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.

[bob1029]

> Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.

I am still not following why Twitch needs to maintain live copies of all the failed runs. Once you hit the objective, make that video the highlight or whatever to be persisted indefinitely.

Why would anyone care about watching several hours of something when they know ahead of time it's not going to be representative of a successful outcome? Iteration #17 out of hundreds can't possibly be valuable enough to justify the storage cost in even the most charitable of cases. It seems to me that most of speed running could be done completely offline without involving the internet and video capture technology (i.e., practicing a musical instrument).

[rincebrain]

Speedrunning in terms of archiving the completed run for future reference as the Thing To Beat, sure.

But part of the reason this has become such a popular thing is the community aspect of it - people get drawn in and inspired to participate because they get engaged in the community of either particular runners or the wider community of people who follow all the runners of some games.

At least for me, while I've never had the desire to participate, when I was sick for a year or so, and therefore at home with little ability to participate in a lot of other things, I went down the rabbit hole of watching different runs of different games, and one of the more useful tools and timesinks was being able to watch the past broadcasts of different runners and seeing if they were enjoyable to watch, at the particular game whose speedruns were interesting me at the moment.

And since not everyone just runs one or two things, sometimes their last runs of those games were months in the past.

So at least in my n=1 experience, those broadcast archives specifically were quite useful for me as a viewer and person attempting to discover more streamers to watch.

[Philpax]

Watching the speedrunner improve, watching them discover new techniques, the discussion they have with their audience, etc. Speedrunning, ironically, is not just about the destination: it's about the (often public!) journey the speedrunner took to get there.

[emacsen]

As the others have said, it's about the journey, so let me expand on this a bit.

Streaming games has a large social component, whether it's speedrunning, or just casual play. It's often as much about the personality of the player as it is about the game. People watch as a communal activity.