Plays tv touts growth that’s better than Instagram and Snapchat after its first year of PC gaming recording

Sometimes, people just want to watch a highlight of an esports match instead of a whole tournament.

Plays.tv, a site that enables people to easily record and view replays of PC games, announced today that it has crossed 10 million monthly active users during its first year. Four million of those users are active content creators, contributing 1.6 billion minutes of video monthly.

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Game broadcasting has become more popular as esports grow, but Plays.tv is a different service from something like Twitch, which lets players stream a direct feed of their game. Plays.tv is all about capturing (via a free program downloaded from the site which can automatically record your PC game sessions) and sharing short highlight clips. It serves a different market than Twitch does, although Forge (which is currently in beta) looks to do something similar.

However, Forge might have a hard time catching up with Plays.tv first-year growth. All of those users show that plenty of gamers enjoy watching highlights from their favorite games, and Plays.tv both gives them a way to record those highlights and an easy site to view them.

“We’re growing faster than Instagram and Snapchat did in year one,” Dennis Fong, chief executive officer and co-founder of Raptr (the parent company that owns Plays.tv) told GamesBeat. Instagram reached 10 million total users (not monthly) a little less than a year after launching. Same with Snapchat. ” We effectively have two times the amount of unique creators on our platform compared to Twitch. Obviously it’s a smaller user base as a whole, but that’s part of what makes it interesting. It’s people sharing with each other more so than a personality sharing with many viewers.”

Plays.tv doesn’t allow users to monetize its clips by running ads in front of them yet, although Fong told GamesBeat it is testing such options.

The service’s editing tools can also automatically create highlight clips for League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, two of the most popular esports. The company is launching the Plays.tv Platform today, which will allow developers to insert support for Plays.tv into their games. Currently, Plays.tv runs off of self-funding and venture capital.