[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.