Demystifying the Largest Live Game Streaming Platform via Black-Box Measurement

Abstract

Empowered by today's fast development of e-sports (Electronic Sports) games, more and more people are watching live-game-streaming through various platforms aside from playing by themselves. Understanding the characteristics of these platforms can benefit both the game viewers and the platform. However, the live game streaming platforms in China, which has the largest game market in terms of both the revenue and the total number of gamers in the world, are still under the veil of mystery. In this paper, we present an initial investigation on Douyu, the largest live game streaming platform in China. We inferred the platform's architecture and workflow by analyzing the captured traffic and crawled data. Moreover, we investigated the statistics and patterns from both the broadcasters' and viewers' perspectives. Compared with the world-wide live game streaming platform Twitch, the regional platform Douyu has more regular daily changes in online channels, which can provide insights for resource provisioning in the future system optimization. Based on the measurement, it is found that the top 7.5 % of games have attracted 79.5 % viewer's attention. Moreover, the number of mobile viewers have exceeded the number of PC viewers, taking up about 64.8 % of the total viewer number. As the most popular mobile game in China, the game Arena of Valor (referred to as wzry in Douyu) has more than 4,500 simultaneous online broadcasters and accounting for 12.7% of the overall attention.