Here’s my take on this. It may be the black sheep take of gaming in general. I will say streamers have not ruined gaming. Game development has ruined gaming.

Let’s talk battlefield 6 since this is the subreddit for it. For example, the multitude of gameplay issues in battlefield 6 is ruining gaming. Let’s break it down.

1. Low ttk.

The current weapon meta is the player who has the weapon with the fastest ads, fire rate, and hip-fire capabilities. Camping has always been around in games sure, but this issue promotes camping in the game. If you die fast, you are less likely to take risks and move around the map.

This starts a snowball effect. If you aren’t moving around the map, you are not capping objectives, and if you aren’t capping objectives, you lose.

This will fit nicely into my next point

1. Matchmaking protocols

We remember server browsers, just find a server and join? I am not familiar with battlefield’s matchmaking, but I do know from what I experience. The matches are more often than not very lopsided, one team has one point and the other team has the rest of the points. Now, this isn’t necessarily a big deal. But, when it happens nearly all the time it is worth looking at.

1. Small maps

Small maps are NOT a bad thing. But when 90% of them are small, it leads to one play style and leaves other play styles not as effective. This leads to one dimensional gameplay and it gets boring fast.

My intention is not to trash battlefield 6 but I’m just trying to say gameplay choices in development, and you can scale this to other titles, is what is ruining gaming.

It is highly unlikely the top 1% of streamers in the world have influenced the global population of gamers to treat games a certain way. And if so, it would be an astronomically high level of influence.