Valve Rolls Out Game Broadcasting Service For Steam 92
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.
ios/android support? (Score:1)
twitch afaik supports ios/android
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In the "Live from Playstation" app it only shows PS4 streaming, but the PS4 does have a web browser, and you can watch non-PS4 streams in it. I just pulled up a DOTA2 stream on twitch in it to check.
If the PS4's web browser gives you a not enough memory error, close the window and restart it.
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That game is awesome. Still have framerate issues at certain parts, major audio problems, and objectives sometimes randomly disapearing/not working.
But this game has massive potential. Haven't had this much fun in a FPS in a long time. Lack of content is going to be an issue, but it is early access.
Between buying this game and prison architect on the weekend sale, I honestly haven't had this much fun gaming in a long time, all from "simple" games (prison architect far from simple) and all for a grand total
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I was skeptical at first but 7 Days to Die is definitely a great game, even in it's current unfinished state. My only complaint would be that I can't cheese much by using a wiki. There is a wiki for it but given the pace of development it is frequently out of date, and frankly just missing very pertinent information.
Games themselves are copyrighted (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think they mean something like Don't include a company emblem in your character customisation, but you're right, it's confusing.
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Valve is a slumbering behemoth. They seem to have dropped any big push for SteamOS (as the goal was to loosen Microsoft's control through their App Store, and this appears to have been successful), but if they really wanted to brute force it they would have a lot of power to bring to bear, in terms of both capital and support. The MAFIAA has far more capital and legal resources, but Valve wouldn't go down without giving them a large bruising and, perhaps, getting some victories that weaken the copyright cas
sounds bad for Amazon's investment (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Agreed that it's bad for Twitch/Amazon in the short term. But it's also going to bring many new users into game streaming/viewing. Because there are people like me who have zero interest in streaming from Twitch or other third party, however I will surely at least check out an integrated game streaming service directly from my own network of Steam friends. More people in the market and general buzz about streaming, could mean more growth opportunities for Twitch/Amazon even if they do lose some users to Ste
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I'm not so sure. Take GOTV/DotATV as examples. Tournaments can fund themselves by tickets(and many do) to watch the matches in-game(with commentators streamed in-game if you so choose). If that option extends to Steam Broadcast in the future, many tournaments would possibly keep Twitch only as a stream on the side, and focus on the Steam Broadcast, because that's where they could make most of their money, through tickets, store items etc, instead of a small margin on Twitch's advertising profits.
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I'm not so sure. Take GOTV/DotATV as examples. Tournaments can fund themselves by tickets(and many do) to watch the matches in-game(with commentators streamed in-game if you so choose)....
I'd like to see statistics for what percentage of all gamers watch tournaments, because my strong suspicion is tournament viewers are and probably always will be a niche market - a very profitable niche for some companies, but niche nonetheless. The much bigger piece of the pie will be getting the vast majority of casual or "average" gamers to get on board with streaming and I think streaming integration with Steam could potentionally open up that larger market.
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Eh, just the CSGO finals at Dreamhack this weekend had over 400k viewers just via officially counted streams, then there were a lot of viewers via GOTV. Some swedish media had their own streams from Dreamhack. Also, swedish and finnish TV channels broadcast some of the matches too... So, there are a lot of people watching.
The biggest DotA2 event, The International, featured not tickets to access the streams, but a compendium and bonus items that tracked various stats through the tournament. Half of the pric
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Those numbers would still pale in comparison to the millions of worldwide casual gamers that is a mostly untapped market.
I don't think tournament streaming is good analogue to Steam's streaming service either. Tournaments are big one-time events, which get a lot of attention, but the event and any revenues generated from it quickly come to an end. Valve integrating streaming into Steam is an attempt to have game streaming a regular part of casual gamers every day lives, which is how they could tap into prev
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Many of these viewers are casual gamers. That's what you have to understand.
Gaming is no longer the 80's and 90's isolated circles. Games like Counter-Strike, DotA2, Starcraft 2 has reached way beyond that in terms of spectatorship. I don't actually play Starcraft 2 at all, but I still watch matches from time to time. I don't play DotA 2 or CS:GO other than sporadically, yet I watch tournaments etc.
In fact, the casual gamers will pull in less money, due to being less appealing to the general public, and peo
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Many of these viewers are casual gamers. That's what you have to understand
I get it, but what you don't seem to get is that tournament viewers are still a small sliver of the potential pie. 400k viewers for CSGO Dreamhack is great, amazing even, but there are many more millions of worldwide gamers. That's Valve's target market.
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I think you vastly overestimate the theoretical viewerbase. Tournaments probably attract MORE casual gamers than dedicated player/non-tournament game streams. Comparison with real sports: The hardcore fans will watch every single league game, will watch qualification matches, will watch training sessions etc(this is very common in racing), the casuals will tune in for major tournaments, or the race itself etc. My brother watches football games every week, I watch the European Championship and the World Cham
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I think you vastly overestimate the theoretical viewerbase.
I disagree and I can prove my point with real numbers: http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
That shows over the course of one day approximately 4 to 7 millions users log into Steam ALONE. The actual number of worldwide gamers only goes up from there and it's a largely uptapped market. Current tournament viewership isn't even close.
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Just because there are that many people logging onto Steam every day does not equate to that many people being interested in viewing game streams.
And, as I said, but you ignored, CSGO was only one of the games going on at Dreamhack alone, and probably the one with the smallest playerbase. Total concurrent viewership was easily well over a million, just on the officially counted streams. Then there were the TV channels, in-game etc(Valve already has GOTV and DOTATV, so you can watch in-game).
Likewise, the gr
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Eh, just the CSGO finals at Dreamhack this weekend had over 400k viewers just via officially counted streams, then there were a lot of viewers via GOTV. Some swedish media had their own streams from Dreamhack. Also, swedish and finnish TV channels broadcast some of the matches too... So, there are a lot of people watching.
But the question is, are they Europeans/Koreans.....or Americans. In America watching game tournaments isn't a mainstream thing. Kinf of like how it seems every UK village has it's own LUG that meets in a pub....but the few US LUG's are university based and DON'T meet at pubs. In fact, you pull a laptop out at a bar in the US and the owner would probalby kick you out.
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The viewers are from all over the world including the US and Canada(And keep in mind, while CSGO was going on, there were still other games being played and streamed/broadcasted).
I didn't say it was completely mainstream. However, unlike what the poster I replied to claimed, it's not only hardcore gamers that care about the competition in tournaments. Casual gamers flock to watch the tournaments, including them people who wouldn't really call themselves gamers.
Otoh, in the nordic countries at least, we have
I guess it shows that Valve as a company .... (Score:2)
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
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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.
If you mean viewing a stream, apparently you only need Safari or Chrome to do it. I haven't actually tested that, though.
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The way I read it is that you need Steam to watch any matches.
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It looks like you need a Steam account to watch. You can view the list of public broadcasts [steamcommunity.com], but attempting to watch them (even on the supported browsers) brings me to a login page. No idea if it works in just a browser if you have a Steam account.
Oh, and if you're at work, visiting that page also verified other reports that people were using it to stream porn. So visit it at your own risk.
Re: I guess it shows that Valve as a company .... (Score:2)
Steam is to games what the DVR is to television. It is this level of convenience, in the purchase and use of games, that defines Steam. Other platforms had this, but failed to develop it the way Steam has, and they will never catch up. Valve doesn't need Episode 3.
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TV defined (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 c
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Couldn't disagree with this more. Steam has revolutionized PC gaming. It's opened up an easy avenue for indie devs to get on a level playing field with the big publishers. I really don't care if Valve never produces another game, I think they should keep making Steam better.
Steam gives the PC an edge over consoles too! No need to go out and buy a game, you can do it right from your desktop and the way it shares games between any PC you want to use, it really takes the pain out of DRM.
PC gaming has neede
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Steam gives the PC an edge over consoles too! No need to go out and buy a game, you can do it right from your desktop and the way it shares games between any PC you want to use, it really takes the pain out of DRM.
That's how PSN has worked for how many years now? 8? I have a PS4...do you want to know how many physical PS4 discs I own? Precisely zero.
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I haven't owned a console since 8-bit Nintendo, so I didn't know that. Interesting!
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Beats me. I don't usually game on my Mac, but I just installed a random game from my list (The Binding of Isaac) and it ran just fine, and I'm on 10.6 Snow Leopard.
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You really don't have a choice about upgrading the Steam client. It installs its updates in the background.
I'm using the latest version, on Snow Leopard, and it works. If you're having problems on Lion, I'd suggest uninstalling, cleaning its preferences, and reinstalling perhaps?
There was an entry in the update notes that the latest patch was re-released on 11/25 due to a Mac problem.Maybe try updating it before anything else.
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It's a competitor for what is currently the shitty part of streaming, It's simply lowers the bar to entry so you can share streams with a few clicks. Integrating it with steam is obvious because it gives you that social component you already use to organize multiplayer games and communicate with other PC gamers.
In other words, it essentially does what the PS4 does via the Share feature and makes streaming easy.
this is akin to Office Online (Score:2)
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...
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> I'm the proud owner of 300+ games
you havent read Steam TOS have you?
you are the proud owner of a TEMPORARY license to use those games, steam borrowed you those games, steam owns them and can delete them from your hdd at any time
Stranger danger (Score:2)
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.
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They are congratulated on everything and nothing was ever expected of them.
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"Want to watch your friends play instead of playing?"
NO.
Why on Earth would you do that? Either play with them, or do something else entirely.
Is this honestly what the youth of gaming are doing with their time nowadays?
Requires more GPUs and more copies (Score:2)
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.
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Local Man Angry That People Sometimes Want To Watch Things Other Than Things He Wants To Watch
Where is your anger coming from? Are you honestly that surprised that someone might want to watch someone else play a video game? Have you ever played a video game? I ask this honestly because your argument sounds as if you literally cannot conceive any joy whatsoever coming from a video game that's not being actively played by you.
Is this honestly what the adults of gaming are doing with their time nowadays? Compl
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Maybe you suck at the game and want to watch a good player for tips and techniques.
Maybe you enjoy the audiovisual aspect of the game but are unable to play at the moment.
Maybe it's like national sports---watching is more fun than participating. Millions of people watch football throughout the season, while only thousands actually play it regularly.
Actually, if you have ever voluntarily watched sports, you have no room to criticize them for making essentially the same decision.
Works but it's CPU hungry (Score:2)
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.
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I didn't notice any worse performance with this over using OBS(which is built on top of x264) or Xsplit, which are the two I otherwise use. If anything, Stream Broadcast at the same bitrate and target resolution was slightly less taxing for my i5-2500
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Try that on my current (aging) Athlon X2 4850e. I tried to stream enemy territory - something I have no problems doing using virtualdub as a framebuffer splitter. CPU got so bogged down that it bottlenecked and my GeForce 7950GT (which does 120+ FPS on this game) stumbled down to ~20.
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So what encoder settings do you use with virtualdub, and what settings?
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480p 750kbit x264. It's not like the game needs much more resolution to display everything properly.
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Ok, so grainy stamp quality.
Did you use similar settings in Steam Broadcast, or did you leave at default, which is 2500kbit/s and 720p?
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>grainy stamp quality
>not having a TV that can do filtering natively since 2006
Well, I guess I can't expect someone behind the times to understand.
I've even tried it at higher resolutions (because yes, some GPUs actually have issues with lower resolutions due to lazy driver makers/programmers) and still get the same results.
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TV? Who's bothering with that crap? I'm talking about watching it in a player on one of my 1080p monitors. No amount of filtering will properly compensate for that low quality, even in native resolution.
As for someone behind the times, maybe you should take a look at your old equipment.
I tried Skyrim with Steam Broadcast, your Virtualdub approach, OBS and Xsplit. 720p, 2500kbit/s bitrate. 30 FPS, using otherwise default presets, and on my system(i5-2500 and 750 Ti, 8GiB RAM), I had no FPS loss, no stutter,
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"As for someone behind the times, maybe you should take a look at your old equipment."
Considering my 'old equipment' was perfectly fine until the current load of bloated AAA titles, which the demoscene could've done in 512 kilobytes of code, came out (and run flawlessly on my machine, at that,) you're trying to justify broken and bloated code by saying your newer hardware runs it just fine, when there are programs out there that have done the SAME THING for many more years, and don't need even half the foot
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Geez dude, you probably need a card that can do CUDA for hardware accelerated encoding.
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Define "CPU-intensive". How many execution units are we talking about here? 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. As long as streaming only needs a couple, you should be fine.
On the other hand, the network card might kill the CPU with interrupts when playing plus sending out the stream (especially an online game), but that would be a network driver issue, not really CPU.
As AAA detail levels rise (Score:2)
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 en
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Even if it does that there's still CPU overhead. It's not like GPU acceleration magically bypasses the need for the CPU to pass instructions and data.
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How recent and which ones? from quick googling it seems you need a GT6xx series on up for Nvidia?
Sensationalized summary (Score:1)
That summary is a lot of conjecture and assumption.
Me, me, me, me!!! (Score:2)
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Anonymous Cowaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrddddddddd.
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Why are you so angry at people wanting to sit around a virtual couch?
Not all my friends live within driving distance anymore.
What purpose does your anger serve other than to inform others: "I hate change!!"?
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Not a Twitch competitor (Score:1)
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 m
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Windows? Safari? (Score:2)
Last time I checked Apple had discontinued Safari for Windows, so what is that about?