Only four years old, Twitch already has 100 million viewers who consume 20 billion minutes of gaming every month. According to one 2014 study, Twitch is the fourth-­most-­visited site on the Internet during peak traffic periods, after Netflix, Google and Apple and above Facebook and Amazon. (Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for about $1 billion, all of it cash.) And there is money in it for the gamers themselves, called ‘‘streamers’’: Fans can subscribe to channels for extra access, or they can send donations of any amount. Streamers with modest followings can make respectable incomes — hundreds or thousands of dollars a month — and the very top streamers are getting rich.

PC gaming has enthusiastically embraced crowdfunding. On Kickstarter, video games (most of of which PC games) is the highest-funded category

Another form of video game remixing happens on broadcasting sites like Twitch, where you can watch live videos of people playing games (while they chat with the audience — the end result is an interesting mix between video games and talk radio).

Remixing books is popular on services like Wattpad where users write fanfiction inspired by books, celebrities, movies, etc. From a legal perspective, some fanfiction could be seen as copyright or trademark infringement. From a business perspective, the book industry would be smart to learn from the PC gaming business. Instead of fighting over pieces of a shrinking pie, try to grow the pie by getting more people to read and write books.

In the gaming world, “mods” are user created versions of games or elements of games. Steam has about 4500 games but about 400 million pieces of user-generated content. Dota itself was originally a user-created mod of another game, Warcraft 3.Contrast this to the music industry, which relies on litigation to aggressively stifle remixing and experimentation.

PC games are so popular they can also make money from live events. Live gaming competitions have become huge: over 32M people watched the League of Legends championship this year, almost double the number of people who watched the NBA finals.

The types of games on Steam vary widely, as do the business models. The most popular game, Dota 2, is free. It makes money selling in-app items, mostly “cosmetic items” that alter the appearance of characters.

Non-Traditional Students: The New Majority

2. Is it reasonable to compare the costs of xMOOCs to the costs of online credit courses? Are they competing for the same funds, or are they categorically different in their funding source and goals? If so, how?

it is difficult to see how publicly funded higher education institutions can develop sustainable business models for MOOCs;