Yeah, I like the disembodied voice. But I’m into radio. I think you can entertain people by the sound of your voice and what you say. Having the guy on the screen is a far distant second to that. Then again, I’m into radio.
Honestly, I think it’s almost a generational thing. For the people who are really into the streaming, it’s just an expected part of the format.
There was a story on Idle Thumbs a little while back about how somebody with a young (9 year old-ish) kid heard voices coming from his room when they knew he was alone playing games. The Mom goes to peek, and the kid is playing some platformer, and narrating what he’s doing in a British accent. Because for that kid, that just how he experiences games, so that’s his understanding of how you’re supposed to interact with games. Kind of like that, a twitch stream is supposed to have a player-cam.
My God, TotalBiscuit has infected his brain
I think I’ll set up Twitch tonight, but I’m not sure how many people will watch me considering I’m on a Japanese time zone. I guess there are always Australians…
Watching the streamer laugh if something funny happens, or be scared in a horror game, or see him facepalm or rage… it increases the empathy with him and the entertainment experience of the stream in general.
Does Jamie Madigan (Thrrrrrpt, I think?) still post here? I bet he could dash off a quick couple hundred words about that, something about empathy and mirror neurons or something.
I think there’s an element of “watching your cool older sibling play games on the TV” to it, too, perhaps. You weren’t allowed to participate, but it was still fun to experience it vicariously.
Nevermind that most of these streamers are like a decade younger than me. . .
Somtimes I do feel like an old man when I watch a stream. A lot of the “personalities” are as grating to me as morning radio DJs.
The worst I saw was two college-age guys playing DayZ together. (The actual game feed was just from one guy’s POV.) They were the pinnacle of jerky dudebros. Loud, obnoxious, and completely getting off on being assholes to other players. “BOOM! HOWYALIKETHATBEEYOTCH!? MAN WE TOTALLY JUST RAPED THAT NOOB!” To make matter worse, they were in the same room, but their PiP boxes were placed on opposite sides of the feed relative to their physical positions. They kept high-fiving and turning their heads to talk to each other, but it looked like they were gesturing to the borders of the Twitch screen. The bottom third of the screen was taken up with a custom scrolling ad for Turtle Beach headsets and Razer accessories.
They were the most popular DayZ feed that day.
I thought that was the point of the genre. Isn’t it just an open world Thunderdome crossed with the much pined after griefers’ paradise of games like Ulitima Online with a thin “oh yeah…ZOMBIES!” veneer? Well, except 7 Ways to Die perhaps. It is almost box art worthy. In fact the “raped that noob” dudebro is positively sane to what I expect to see on the back of DayZ boxes (I know, I know, but just go with it). I more expected:
“We totally just raped that noob after driving him off to the middle of nowhere, taking all of his clothes, force feeding him shards of glass in rancid food, and making our personal slave for a real life week until we got bored and shot him. 10/10”-- Asshats Magazine
Sure, DayZ is a griefer’s paradise, but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that there literally isn’t much else to do in the game at this point. There’s no crafting and the zombies are barely more than static props.
Still, I think there’s a difference between people playing DayZ like they’re bandits and actually acting like assholes. You can play without being a total douche. I’ve played DayZ, Rust, and 7 Days and been robbed and killed in all three of these games, but my experiences have been mostly positive. You can tell when someone is playing a role and when someone is taking out their life’s frustrations on you.
I’d love to stream, but sadly my upload rate (a pathetic 512Kbps) is way too bad for it. Even the best upload rates offered probably wouldn’t be good enough for decent streaming.
think mine is between 3-5 mbps. I’d like more for sure.
I usually hate to bring up my own stuff in forums like this, but it seems like this is a good thread for it. If this is unwelcome then I can edit/delete it no questions asked.
Tonight at 9:30PM Eastern time me and a friend will be doing a twitch stream for the fun little indie game called “Hockey?”. Yes, the question mark is part of the name. Despite its simplistic appearance, the game is surprisingly fun to both play and watch. There are actually active leagues for it in both North America and Europe. If you have any interest in either hockey, competitive gaming or small fun indie games it might just be worth checking out.
Stream: www.twitch.tv/ibn2
Game: www.hockeyquestionmark.com
English speaking community: www.reddit.com/r/hockeyquestionmark
If anybody watches it and wants to provide some feedback I would be grateful.
[/shameless-plug]
My own experience streaming with OBS has been pretty fun journey. I started doing streams about once or twice a week back around 6 months ago using OBS. Fortunately I have a 20mbps upload speed so I am able to reliably pump 1080p 30fps video to twitch with no real difficulty.
Most of the complaints I have received have revolved around either dumb mistakes on my end with sound or people not having enough bandwidth to reliably download the 1080p stream in real time. For the sound problems I just make sure to record some sample footage right before going live as a check. This makes sure that everything that is within my control on my computer is good to go. The problems with people being unable to download fast enough can’t really be helped by me outside of lowering the quality of the stream which is something I have considered doing recently.
Concerning post-stream production, OBS actually does a decent job of recording .mp4 video. It’s not Blu-ray quality or anything, but more than acceptable to watch full-screen on my 1920x1200 monitor or for uploading to Youtube. So far I have not felt the need to use anything fancier to capture video. For editing I either use Windows Movie Maker for some very basic cuts, give it to my casting buddy who does a way better job of it than I can or simply don’t bother editing at all and upload to Youtube as-is. Most of the time I have managed to pull off a cast with minimal need for editing. Plus unedited content has appeal to some people.
Right now, none of the casts I have done have featured much anything in the way of fancy graphics or overlays and I don’t even have a webcam plugged into my main gaming/streaming desktop so the PiP thing just isn’t going to happen unless there is some serious pressure for it from (so far mostly non-existent) viewers.
My current microphone is a Blue Yeti. It’s completely overkill for gaming and general VOIP usage, but it works really well for both twitch streaming and pod-casting which is something else I have wanted to start doing. Like any good microphone, it will pick up everything in my entire apartment loud and clear if I do not have it configured correctly.
Killinger:
If and when your stream becomes more popular, Twitch should enable video quality controls on it, allowing users to choose the best resolution for them.
In the interim, I wouldn’t worry about lowering quality to help people. Twitch’s capacity is stretched beyond its limits in EU and most of NA, so plenty of people can’t even reliably stream 360p during peak hours.
AKA, it’s Twitch’s problem, not yours :(
On the other hand, setting too high of a quality doesn’t help the issue at all and makes it less likely that you’ll pick up steam as you’re limiting your crowd. Twitch officially doesn’t support anything above 3500kbps and recommends 2000kbps for the best viewer experience. For a game with the graphics of Hockey? there’s no need to go all out, imo.
Shameless self-promotion time: http://twitch.tv/gen0cidal
I usually do blind (not having played/no real knowledge of the game) races of games and don’t have a real ‘set’ broadcasting time, though SpeedRunsLive’s weekly blind races are on Saturdays around 4pm Eastern. I’ve also been looking for a game to speedrun but haven’t settled on one yet; right now Symphony of the Night is the frontrunner.
To echo other people, the pip is great because you see the person’s reactions. Twitch is about somebody else’s interaction with the game – sure you can watch a stream without seeing someone’s facial reaction, but you can stream without listening to them either. If you understand why a mic could be nice in a stream, pip is just an extension of it.
I played around with it, OBS was fairly easy to set up after watching a random how-to video or two on youtube. I quit twitch casting because after a couple days of streaming, Time-Warner started blatantly destroying my internet connection whenever I streamed. My (downstream) connection would go from a perfectly fine 50ms no packet loss to 300+ ms with lots of packet loss when I hosted my twitch account. A couple minutes after stopping the stream and therefore ceasing upstream, my connection would revert to normal. After looking into any other excuses for the net performances I just caved in and quit streaming.
Re Valve/Steam: Valve seems pro-Twitch in that they helped integrate twitch accounts with steam accounts. Valve went as far as allowing people that buy in-game Dota 2 tournament tickets to get credit (potentially item drops) for watching those games on twitch. I’d imagine that click to stream is some kind of project chugging away slowly on “Valve Time”.
Mmmm…well I’m 41 so either I’m not the norm of our generation of gaming or it’s something else.
Turin is exactly right in why I want to see a picture. I want to see their expression after a great accomplishment (or defeat). Some people like to actually heavily interact with the streamer and some people really enjoy talking to each other in chat. There’s really a lot more to the twitch experience than just watching a game. It’s really interactive TV that caters to very specific tastes.
Also, sure a lot of the streamers are dude-bro a-holes - but there’s a lot more normal people than a-holes streaming. Most of the guys I watch (Tornis and his ilk) are heavy strategy players and it’s a lot of fun watching someone who is a lot better than I am at these games puzzle out things in front of you. Imagine being able to watch and see Bruce Geryk play against Tom live in a Tom v Bruce - that would be phenomenal!
If you have tried twitch and don’t get it, I would suggest you pick a game / genre you like and sort the streams by that. Don’t just watch what’s on the front page - I rarely ever watch that stuff. It’s full of stuff or personalities I’m not interested in. Also skip around (just like tv), if someone has 9 viewers there’s a good chance they maybe just are not very good at streaming or don’t have the personality cut out for it. I only stream occasionally so my close friends can watch me screw up in games - I have no illusions of being entertaining to anyone beyond that.
Also keep in mind that a lot of streamers are catering to a very specific audience - the minecraft fans for example. They don’t expect you’ll stroll in and enjoy it. It’s like sitting down next to your daughter on the couch while she’s watching icarley or something - You’re gonna have a bad time…mmmmkay?
There’s also some really weird phenomena on twitch. Check out the saltybet channel and pay attention to the chat (the best you can anyway, it’s very coarse if that will offend you). There’s no streamer personality - just AI fighting AI in a street fighter like game with weird random characters. The audience can bet on a separate web site on the outcome. That particular channel is really about the chat room and the craziness that goes on in it.
Kappa.
Kappa.
Kappa.
In reality, that reminds me of something. I love the FGC (fighting games community) because it’s such a well-defined and specific subculture within gaming. It’s replete with all sorts of unique terminology, both game-related (e.g., he’s a “charging character” or “teching” mid-air to avoid a combo) and external to that (being “salty” about a loss, getting “bodied” in a match, feeling “hype” from a great game). It’s still got these fascinating vestiges of oldschool arcade culture, and indeed, more than a couple big streams are actually played out of arcades. It feels very “homegrown” insofar as the natural communities tend to be by city as much as they are by game or genre–New York Smashers can have an entirely different feel than LA Smashers. Finally, it’s one of the few larger online communities where you’ll regularly find significant non-white representation as well as a fully global playerbase (the French Soul Calibur powerhouses, the untoppable Japanese Street Fighter players, the growing South Korean incursion, etc.).
I hate that McMaster couldn’t spell Twitch when creating this thread.
I have been watching GameDVR on the Xbox to see clips from my friends from when they’re playing Forza 5, Need For Speed, Assassin’s Creed 4, Dead Rising 3, Max, etc. And I have to admit, it’s kind of cool. I haven’t been able to find the twitch feature on PS4 yet. Is it under Playstation Live or the Playroom or something?