Steam Broadcasting Now Open To Everyone 93
jones_supa writes: The beta test phase of Steam Broadcasting feature has been completed. It is now available to everyone by updating the client to the newest version. The feature allows users to watch and stream games to and from users on your friends list. Right-clicking the name of a friend who is in-game offers the option to "Watch Game." This will send a request which needs to be accepted by the player so that the spectator can hop in. A chat is also included. Steam Broadcasting was first announced late last year as an alternative to third-party streaming services like Twitch, Ustream and Hitbox.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
I know what I'll be doing [penny-arcade.com].
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Just don't turn it on. Easy peasy.
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Anonymous Coward
Re:Great! How do I disable it (Score:5, Informative)
Settings, Broadcasting, change "Privacy Setting" to "Broadcasting disabled."
Although I'm pretty sure you have to explicitly choose to start broadcasting, although once you start, I could easily see Steam continuing to broadcast even after you left the game.
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It's rm -rf /*, get it right.
Also that's only when you launch Steam for Linux if your Steam data directory is a symlink or if you use steam.sh --reset without having Steam installed.
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Even worse is watching people tal
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You sat around playing Civilization 2 and injecting heroin?
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...I dont understand why people would want to watch people play a game. that to me is the definition of lazy. because you have got to be seriously lazy if you cant be bothered to pick up a controller to play and instead sit around watching people play.
I have 2 kids. You can't "watch the kids" and play a video game (the types I enjoy playing anyway) effectively at the same time. One or the other is going to suffer. Watching someone play a videogame is not a substitute for playing myself but it passes the time while the kids watch Frozen (again). Playing video games really needs 95% of my attention. If I had 80% of my attention available, I would watch a TV show or Movie. Watching others play video games is a background media, something to do when
Buy your kids a chemistry set... (Score:2)
I got my first one when I was 5, my really nice one when I was 8.
Amazingly enough, electronics were more fun than explosives; hooda thunkit?
Your kids will do better if you're only there for the bigger problems; hovering is not good.
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As someone with a 18 month old and a 4.5 year old then yeah absolutely the 4+ year old could have a chemistry set and you could do something else. Though unfortunately her preference is to colour in my little ponys.
As for the 18 month old. Lets see, could I realistically leave her alone for any length of time? If I was to put her in a playpen, with nothing too small, and prevented older sister giving her anything I could probably leave her and she will just scream, but I could ignore that right? Or she
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depends, i've got people on my friends list who my watching could probably improve my game. movement, aiming and such. the in-game spectator mode isn't phenomenal.
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Tactics and strategies you can absorb this way, but physical skills (eg, aiming) are more like your golf example. Knowing that you should avoid the sand pit doesn't mean squat if you can't get the ball to land in front of you more than half the time.
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nah, movement tricks, positioning, how often they check their six etc, how they fight certain enemies, not necessarily tactically, but if it's just aim/reaction or if it's something else. how long they take traversing the map, and how long do they spend entering a room etc etc. what they aim for in a clusterfuck etc etc.
also, for smaller games that don't have massive followings. could help sharing information.
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Does it help if I do this? I know a LOT of people who watch other people play sports and somehow that is OK.
"i just dont get it TBH, i guess im just old now (29 haha) but i find the idea of watching other people that I dont know...play SPORTS does nothing for me. I dont mind watching my friends play because, they are my friends. but I dont understand why people would want to watch people play SPORTS.
Even worse is watching people talk about watching other people play SPORTS (Sportscenter?)"
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Are you trying to counter the OPs point, or re-enforce it? ;)
Watching or playing sport has zero appeal for me; watching people play video games is pretty much the same. People talking about sport makes me want to gnaw a limb off to escape from the conversation.
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... People talking about sport makes me want to gnaw a limb off to escape from the conversation.
Ha! You and me, both.
But then, I never had a chance to learn all of the details of the sports in question. Maybe that makes a difference.
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My circle of friends do it to show stuff to each other - "look at this cool thing I did!" or "hey, I can't figure out why this isn't working."
We don't often watch each each other play just for the sake of it.
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What if you don't own the game, and just want to see your friend demo it? Or your friend is showing you how to find the secret level, but without all the hassle of making a video. Yes, it's not very special I agree.
There are a few other uses but those come with drawbacks of having to add strangers to your friends list. Which maybe says it all right there; it's about social networking, so if you still think twitter or instagram are a bit weird then no way would this make sense.
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I watch game-play videos to see if a game is worth buying and sometimes to get ideas about how to play more effectively.
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Why do people watch sports?
How do you get to 29 years of age and still not understand this?
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My son took over my game from me (trying to play a kids game on steam, only the appropriate ones are loaded, and if you are logged on multiple times, the most recent is "primary" and the rest secon
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Trademark conflict (Score:2)
with Steamcast? http://www.steamcast.com/ [steamcast.com]
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Someone should tell Twitch that their business isn't necessary.
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I suspect that's been done already.
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Umm... you can't watch a friend while waiting for his game to finish via a pre-recorded video...
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Well, one of the things I like to watch on twitch is Spelunky runs. Every run is different (random levels, don't you know), and the streamer interacts with chat in between levels (sometimes in the middle of levels, if they're reckless). They also have a "death roulette" function, so you can compete in guessing how the streamer will kick it, obviously that's one thing that won't work with prerecorded video.
Re:World's most useless feature (Score:5, Interesting)
Who the hell wants to watch other people play games when you could be playing them yourself?
That's what I said. But then I started watching a few streams. You can pick up tactics, skills, ideas from streams. You can also help out new players, or watch a game you're interested in buying. It has it's uses.
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And in the same response I have for people who point me at YouTube links to "teach me how to do something":
You're telling me it wouldn't be quicker to google a page of tips for the game?
Fuck sitting through a ten-minute video about how to click on a certain combination of buttons in some software, and double-fuck watching random streams to pick up game tactics as opposed to PLAYING THE FUCKING GAME against/with those same people.
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You're telling me it wouldn't be quicker to google a page of tips for the game? Fuck sitting through a ten-minute video about how to click on a certain combination of buttons in some software
These days, tactics and strategies aren't just like "Jump towards the opponent and press down, down-right, right+strong attack" Games are more complex, with some things "seeing" things can help. It also depends on the game. It's not a all or nothing thing.
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sometimes you get to a point where nothing you do is making you good enough to beat those people. and maybe spectating some of them might help.
i'm probably somewhere near the point where spectating some of the better players in ns2 will help me against them or against people like them.
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If there's a specific piece of knowledge you want to get, reading the wiki is better. However, if you don't know much about the game and just want to learn as much as possible, watching it being played is far better. Sometimes videos are better even for specific knowledge (think for instance Super Meat Boy levels).
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Me and my friends regularly watch each other play dota2 while we are waiting for everyone to join the same party to get a game rolling.
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I adore watching speedruns. Okay, it's not the Olympics, but it's still fun to watch someone demonstrating a lot of skill.
Also to make streaming more personal--I remember that Zork: Grand Inquisitor had a multiplayer mode. It's your standard Mystlike first-person puzzle game, but you could let someone be a backseat driver, talk to you, point at things. It's not for everyone, but if you actually liked playing those games as a group and someone's moved across the country...yeah, pretty nice.
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Who the hell wants to watch other people play games
Only a few hundred millions of people...
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
when you could be playing them yourself?
Only idiots that think and insist those two things are exclusive and that you can't do both.
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Who the hell wants to watch other people sing at the opera when you could be singing yourself?
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Anonymous Coward Posts Ill-Informed Opinion
"I'm a big idiot", later added.
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Same reason people watch other people play sports.
Hell, in most IRC channels, people do exactly what they do in a Twitch chatroom, but they don't even have anything shared to watch!
It's actually a nice feature. (Score:5, Informative)
I've found Steam's broadcasting feature to be quite handy for getting a handle on the basic mechanics of games with a steep learning curve, such as Crusader Kings II. If you tell a player you're watching him for the purposes of learning the game, he will often slow down and explain his actions.
I also like to watch FTL. It's fun to be a back-seat starship captain, and many of the players like it too, as having an extra set of eyes and ears can be helpful for catching things you might overlook: "Uhh, dude ... Your ship is on fire ... ".
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It's fun to be a back-seat starship captain, and many of the players like it too, as having an extra set of eyes and ears can be helpful for catching things you might overlook:
I'm a back seat minecrafter. Just watching guys randomly mine caves without any organization, or collecting wood at night...outside, or not having any walls just makes me scream.
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It's also well implemented. I tried the beta with a friend a few days before the final release. It has a way shorter delay than Twitch, about 8-10 seconds only (last time I broadcast with Twitch, the delay was something like double that). It was also very stable and bandwidth-efficient, both for the broadcaster and the viewer. It didn't stop to buffer even once during our test stream which was on full quality (I think about 3000kbps - a very nice quality 1080p gamestream). Both of us were on quite normal br
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't open to everyone. It doesn't support any web browsers other than Chrome and Windows 8Internet Explorer. They won't be competing with Twitch anytime soon with those restrictions.
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And you're prohibited from using Chrome because...?
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Not going to switch to another browser for one website.
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So use it for all websites. Chrome is likely better than whatever you're currently using.
Why are you here? Got nobody to talk to on G+ ?
Seriously. I have no interest whatsoever in using Chrome for anything, let alone everything. I just don't like Google THAT much... or at all really, when you get right down to it.
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So you're complaining that it isn't open to everyone because it doesn't support a browser that you like to use, even though you have complete freedom to use a browser which is supported by the site at zero cost to yourself. Zero.
As an alternative you can just use the Steam client itself, which supports everything you need.
That isn't Steam locking people out. That's you locking yourself out for no reason other than pure stubbornness and a need to bitch about a free service.
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what OS cant run chrome???
With each new release, my low-powered devices get even more sluggish with Chrome. My Lenovo Tablet 10 [lenovo.com] is a speedy little tablet- everything on the tablet is fast. Except when I open up more than 4 or 5 tabs in Chrome. The memory usage and high CPU usage (when idle / not loading pages) is getting completely out of hand.
I have 4 tabs open right now -Random webpage 38mb ram, Gmail 147mb ram, Facebook 112mb ram, this window 135mb ram. Add the "GPU Process" at 195MB ram, and the "browser process" at 177MB
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/me waits for edge case obsessed Tepples to start talking about game consoles that can't run Chrome.
And non-x86 Linuxes can't run Chrome! Would Someone Think of The Edge Cases!
I did actually check the site in the PS4 web browser, just in case Steam thought it was Chrome or something.
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What about people who don't want to run Chrome? Or who only run Chrome within the google app space?
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There's a difference between "I can't" and "I won't."
I fall squarely in the "I won't" camp. I just don't like it, and everything I don't like about my current browser seems to have been inspired by Chrome.
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It's built into the Steam client, and is primarily a private client-to-client "broadcast". You request to watch a friend, the friend accepts, now you're watching his or her game.
Web viewership for public streams is just a bonus because they built it around h.264 video segments and Chrome and IE11 can play those back with a bit of javascript work.
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It's built into the Steam client, and is primarily a private client-to-client "broadcast".
Reading up, it works like Share Play does on the PS4, except without the actual control sharing.
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It doesn't support any web browsers other than Chrome and Windows 8Internet Explorer. They won't be competing with Twitch anytime soon with those restrictions.
Mean-while over here I think twitch only work in IE for whatever reason (Adblock, Flash, .. Actually I think some maybe FlashBlock white list thing fixed it?) .. anyway. Why it doesn't work here isn't important. It's likely up to my configuration.
What's more important is that it seem to require Flash at least.
So yeah.. so much for "Oh but it requires .."
(Codec thing? Didn't Firefox get H.264 support by Cisco or something?)
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It's not meant to compete with Twitch. It's meant to be a single button streaming for ease of use. It does what it says on the tin and nothing else.
Why must it compete with Twitch?
You can only broadcast on Windows. (Score:4, Informative)
While you can watch streams on Linux and OSX, you can't broadcast with those OS's, not yet anyway. Minecraft's built in streaming doesn't work on Linux either, and Linux users still don't have that promised OBS port.
RaTs! (Score:1)