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Valve Rolls Out Game Broadcasting Service For Steam
An anonymous reader writes: Streaming live video game footage has become increasingly popular over the past several years — popular enough that Amazon was willing to shell out $970 million for Twitch.tv. Now, Valve has announced a rival: Steam Broadcasting. Users signing up for the beta test have the option to broadcast the game they're playing. They have several options about who can see their stream: invite-only, friends only, and publicly visible. Viewing a stream is currently supported by the Steam client itself, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari. It only works on Windows 7 and 8 at this point, but Valve promises support on Linux, OS X, and Windows Vista in the future.
twitch afaik supports ios/android
I was able to use it last night to allow some friends to watch me playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, turn them into believers it is a good game, and show them how fun it is now that they patched out the bugs. Broadcasting is that big of a deal/powerful of a tool.
From the FAQ: "Broadcasts and chats should not include: Copyrighted material". Aren't the visuals in games themselves copyrighted?
The benefits of vertical integration seem pretty strong in this case; especially a lot of casual streaming will end up being easier via Steam since it's just built in. Managing non-public streams will also be easier since people already have Steam friends and can just use that same friends list for access control.
Big tournaments with more money at stake will probably still negotiate deals with a specific streamer, but a lot of just regular streaming, I would guess, will migrate off twitch.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It would be worth the price just for the "Join Game" feature for Skyrim.
Has fundamentally changed.
Once upon a time they were a great game developer who made exceptional games with a great story, and tied in well with the community to really expand that.
With Steam being the 800lb gorilla in terms of online distribution, now getting a lot of competition from others ala Origin, UPlay, GMG, etc, they have doubled down and basically made Steam the most important piece of software in their portfolio. Sorry folks, don't think we will see Half Life 3 any time soon.
Their business model has changed as well. They went from selling copies of games to becoming a distribution network and "item shop" with the skins they sell in games like CSGO/DOTA. CSGO has not received any real changes despite the game being in dire need of them (browse HLTV or Reddit for any evidence), at the development level. Valve employees are allowed to choose which products to work on, and since DOTA is a cash cow the most effort is spent on that, and on Steam itself.
Don't get me wrong -- I really love Steam. I'm the proud owner of 300+ games which I mostly don't play :) However the idea that Steam is an amazing platform is just ridiculous. It has poor support for most everything, it's poorly designed, the social features are atrocious, etc etc. But it provides a stable base for a delivery platform, and that has been its strength, and also the reason Valve has succeeded. I am glad that Steam look at Twitch as a competitor, but making it so that their streaming is only accessible through the Steam client is well -- a terrible decision. The social features that exist within Steam are subpar at best, so the benefit of the integration is lost on me. Twitch offers a lot more, and with the API they have there are a lot of neat tools that people have already made to take advantage of it in a larger way.
Honestly, I hope Steam's streaming platform falls flat on its face; perhaps it will enlighten them that competition is going to be there, and they should get back to the things that make them great -- making great games, staying engaged with the community (which has fallen off considerably in the last few years), and developing Steam to be a much more premiere community rather than a game library.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Too bad literally none of y our friends on Steam will ever be beta users nor use it.
At least that's my situation. Want to watch your friends play instead of playing? Too bad, none of them use broadcasting, or beta.
If your game is CPU-intensive, you're gonna have a bad time with this. Just saying. This is like the Crysis of FRAPS-like programs.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Steam isn't aiming at competition with twitch. It may down the road, but not currently, as you only broadcast when you are actively playing. Not like twitch where the stream is always available.
That summary is a lot of conjecture and assumption.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
Look at me, look at me, look at me! The new guitar solo. Enough of this shite. Please
http://www.acetonestudio.com
DVR? Television? What are these things you speak of
Television (TV) is the serial video programming you currently stream from Netflix, Amazon Prime, or a sport league's subscription service. In the olden days, these shows were transmitted to the public using analog technology that behaved essentially like a huge multicast swarm. Some streamers ran their own one-way APs on different frequencies licensed from the FCC, with a few thousand watts of transmission power to cover a city. Aggregators combined several multicasts into a multiplexed signal sent over a cable or bounced off a satellite. TV was eventually redesigned using digital transmission. Because shows could not be transmitted all the time due to the limited throughput of multicast technologies, a digital video recorder (DVR) was used to collect multicasts and replay them later within a home. Some DVRs also recorded to removable storage so that viewers could watch later while riding in a vehicle, with no need for an expensive cellular data connection.
time traveller from the past?
OTA, cable, and satellite TV still operate and make a profit. In fact, some Internet service providers also provide cable TV and charge less for a bundle of Internet and TV than for Internet alone.
Why on Earth would you do that? Either play with them
To stream a video of a game to three other people, you need to buy one copy of a game, and only the PC running the game needs a gaming GPU. To play over the Internet with them, you need four gaming GPUs and four copies of the game.
Why, in my day, if we wanted to watch someone else play, we had to go out of the house, sneak into someone's yard, climb a tree, and stare through the curtains in their window, and hope we didn't get caught!
The difference is that in an era of higher population density and mass media, hysteria about "stranger danger" has encouraged parents not to allow their children to be free-range children.
It's pretty easy today to have a quad core with HT, and I haven't seen any game use more than 4 of the available 8 execution units on that setup.
"Quad core HT" is also the CPU spec in the latest video game consoles. Many current AAA games have room to spare on a 4-core SMT CPU because they are designed to scale down to the "Xenon" CPU (an in-order 3-core SMT PowerPC) in the Xbox 360 console. But as level of detail in PC/console multiplatform releases rises from the PS3/Xbox 360 level to the level that PS4 and Xbox One are capable of, watch major video game developers start to find a use for this CPU power, leaving little or no room for your video encoder.
I don't see this as a Twitch competitor.
Does it support cams? Does it support streaming from broadcasting software? Does it support archiving recordings? Does it support headset input if the game doesn't have voice support to begin with? The answer to all of these is no and Valve doesn't seem to have plans to add those items either.
What this really is doing is filling a hole that Twitch isn't concerned about: The casual easy stream to my friends/community. I don't know about other's experiences, but my experience with streaming to Twitch casually was a massive pain in the ass. This feature was probably a no-brainer thing to do since it was more than likely just a tweak to their in-home streaming function. So woo-hoo, new feature, not much work required. (Developer mantra.)
Is Twitch concerned about this hole? Probably not. They see it as small potatoes at this point or they would have done something directly to make setting up streaming easier. Also when you have the "professional" streamers who are half game / half talk show drawing in 100-10,000 viewers plus the eSport leagues using their platform for broadcast, they don't care about a casual gamer who may have 0-10 people watching. Even if it's 1000 gamers pulling 0-10 viewers, those aren't sexy numbers for ad sales and that's what drives them.
why would any streamer use this? this is clearly to try to force people to use donations to go directly to their steam wallet or whatever this is called.
gabeN is the antichrist. so he probably will pull that off.
but unless they have nice overlays, console support, any game support... well, i guess everyone can still play bejewled or something, select the option to share desktop and alt tab to league of legends...
Isn't that like watching televised fishing instead of just going fishing yourself?
What fun is there in watching someone else play a video game?
Last time I checked Apple had discontinued Safari for Windows, so what is that about?
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