Sometimes the games that people will watch is not the same as the ones they will play themselves. The same goes for games that are played on-stream vs off-stream, its just a very different way of enjoying the game.

For example, I would hang out in a twitch stream with someone playing a JRPG or a MMO or a dating sim. But I don’t have any interest in playing those genres myself. The fact that I’m watching someone else play doesn’t cut into the studio’s profits at all, because I never would have bought the game in the first place.

For visual novels in particular, I only play these live on stream. I get the most out of them this way. I like to pause the game and talk about things that were brought up in the dialog, or react to something that happened. My favorite is trying to guess things like plot twists. I had a whole Charlie Day pinboard situation going on while I played the Zero Escape games, and I have a lot of fun just chatting with viewers on all sorts or stuff like this. It makes me stop and really appreciate the game a lot more. Completely different experience to when I play by myself - I didn’t even think I liked the genre until I tried playing a smaller one on stream, and now I’m a little bit hooked.

On the flip side of this, I enjoy management and automation games but I absolutely hate streaming them.

Basically the point I’m trying to make is that playing the game solo vs streaming the game vs watching someone else stream the game are all very different ways of experiencing the same game and story. If I find a particularly chatty streamer doing a visual novel I’ve already played, it can be really fun to compare their thoughts and suspicions and reactions to my own, so there’s totally value to both watching and streaming visual novels for me in particular. I’m sure other people are the same way.