1789: Broadcasting Live

In case you weren't aware — and indeed cared — the latest beta version of the Steam client software features broadcast functionality, which means that anyone else out there who is also running a copy of Steam's beta version (or possibly via the Web too; I haven't tried yet) can drop in and start watching the game you're playing at a moment's notice.

This is noteworthy for one important reason: you don't have to set anything up. It's just there. It just, seemingly, works. And, unlike other, dedicated streaming solutions like Twitch and Hitbox, Steam's streaming is intelligent, only actually actively broadcasting when someone shows up and clicks the "Watch Game" button. This means that you can enjoy full performance when no-one is watching — streaming can cause a slight hit to graphics performance in some games — but seamlessly start sharing what you're playing with friends without having to do anything, and without compromising the experience with tiny windows, huge chatboxes and all manner of other rubbish.

This, to me, is the optimum solution for streaming — at least for me. It wouldn't work particularly well for professional streamers or those who run to more of a schedule, but for more casual players who simply want to use streaming as a means of showing other people what a game is like, it's absolutely ideal. I mean it when I said there was absolutely no setting up required, too: no buggering around with encoding, no worrying about bitrates, no creating application sessions or whatever. It just, as they say, works.

I'm still not the sort of person who will sit down and watch a scheduled stream of someone else playing a game — I'd much rather spend my time playing games myself — but that's not really what Steam's broadcasting system is for. Instead, as I noted above, its ideal functionality is for demonstrating games to one another, and pleasingly, it works with anything you run through the Steam client, not just games sold via Steam's storefront. In other words, any game that you've added to Steam via the "Add Non-Steam Game…" option in the menu — and which supports the Steam overlay, allowing you access to your friends list and chat functionality in-game — can be easily broadcasted using the new functionality.

But don't worry; if you're concerned about your lack of skills being shown off to the world and everyone showing up to laugh at you, you do have control over who can watch you. The first time someone requests to watch your game, you have several options — broadcast openly to anyone who wants to watch; broadcast to friends; or don't broadcast at all.

So far the only thing missing from the functionality seems to be some sort of record or archive function, though with the system's seemingly intended use as described above, I'm not sure we'll get that. I'm not too worried, though; I doubt there are many people who would want to watch three hours of prerecorded video of me grinding for my Relic Nexus weapon in Final Fantasy XIV — though there may be some people who have seen me playing it and are interested in taking a look for a few minutes just to see how it plays, as my friend Bowley did this evening.

I'm quietly impressed with the system, then; it'll be interesting to see how much it gets used once it rolls out into the Steam client proper.

1315: Twitchy

I'm still thoroughly baffled by the phenomena that are Let's Play videos and livestreaming of video games.

In the latter case, I sort of get why it would be useful for e-sports — it allows audiences to watch matchups between skilled players, just like real-world sports — but in the former case… hmm.

The argument tends to run that Let's Play videos and livestreaming allow people to get a feel for games they might not have tried. And that's a fair point, with one fairly major-ish issue: the popular Let's Play and livestream feeds are all for the same games all the time… and they're popular games that people already know all about. ("Hey guys, DarkPhantom123 here; welcome to part 527 of my Let's Play Minecraft video!")

The current trend is for people to post videos of them taking on Spelunky's Daily Challenge, a randomly-generated level that is the same for all players worldwide. This can occasionally be amusing, but when there are hundreds of people all posting these same videos, I have to confess I find myself feeling like I'd just rather play the game for myself. Perhaps you can learn something from watching someone else's run, but in my experience, most of these videos tend to be characterised by blind luck and fluke, with genuine skill only entering the picture relatively occasionally. It might just be the people I've watched videos of though.

The thing that strikes me the most about all this, though, is that it feels like such a massive waste of time. I love games; they're my go-to form of entertainment, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to call playing the games I like my job, too. However much I love games, though, whenever I look at, say, the Twitch front page, I feel no desire whatsoever to watch other people playing games; I would rather just get on and play myself. I have lots of games I want to play; it simply, as I say, feels like a massive waste of time to watch other people doing so, particularly when a lot of these streams appear to be nothing more than vanity projects.

I clicked on a few streams on Twitch the other day out of curiosity and felt no desire to keep watching. The first was a guy playing Blizzard's new World of Warcraft-themed card game Hearthstone, and featured a picture-in-picture webcam view of him playing — hardly the most interesting thing to watch, since he wasn't talking or looking at the camera; all you saw was him looking engrossed in the game. The second was someone playing the free-to-play MMO Ragnarok Online 2, which featured some dreadful backing music and footage of someone apparently just running around doing random solo quests. Again, why would I watch that? Particularly when Ragnarok Online 2 is free-to-play, even, meaning that if I was genuinely curious about it I could just, you know, download it and actually try it out for myself?

Perhaps this is a generation gap thing; maybe I'm just too old to understand why people would want to treat games as a spectator sport when they're not designed to be — e-sports excluded, obviously. If I have some free time to devote to games, I want to spend it playing games, not watching other people doing so. Other people apparently disagree, and that's cool — I just wish I understood the phenomenon a bit better. Can anyone explain it to me?