Ever since the dawn of the Twitch livestreaming age, it’s seemed like a no-brainer for Steam to add some sort of quick and easy broadcasting option. And yet for some reason (hint: it’s Valve), they have taken their time. But finally, it’s here.
Valve explained the new feature, called broadcast, on an update page. Finding a game to watch is as simple as trawling your friends list and selecting “watch game” (if they have set Steam to allow it) or finding someone who’s made their streams publicly available by way of a game’s hub page. People can also choose to allow friends to watch their games only if they request to do so first, or they can make them invite-only.
According to Valve, broadcasts begin when people start watching. There is not, it would seem, some sort of dedicated “start broadcast” option. Rather, you have to toggle your settings accordingly and wait for people to trickle in. Seems like that might make it a little hard to advertise the specifics of a stream, but we’ll see.
On the upside (or downside, depending on who you talk to), Steam’s broadcasting function features a live chat, ala Twitch. I can’t wait to see what kinds of new and inventive ASCII dick art Steam’s community dreams up.
Despite all the Twitch similarities, however, Valve’s service does not in any way link up with Twitch. This is in-house Valve tech, which is kind of a bummer. I mean, on the one hand this gives Twitch some real competition — something that’s especially interesting in the wake of the recent $US970 million Amazon buyout — but people with large pre-existing Twitch audiences won’t have any easy way to get everybody under one roof. I guess you could stream over both services at once, but that sounds a) clunky and b) like it would devour the entire world’s supply of bandwidth.
Comments
6 responses to “You Can Now Livestream Games On Steam”
Yay! Epicnessssss!
Funny, Origin has been doing this for at least 9 months or so. But with twitch.
Trust valve to go try and launch their own streaming service rather than pay royalties to another company.
I don’t think they’d want to shoehorn ads or a premium service into steam – so there probably won’t be royalties
Wait, what? Origin is EA’s attempt to avoid paying fee’s to Valve to list their games on Steam.
You can now Livestream Games on steam,.. through twitch, and not through the service Livestream.. gg
I might stream my games as a public service; when other people see how bad I am they will feel so good about themselves!
I was just thinking the same thing.
“Here is me failing the level in Bloody Trapland for half an hour, I may actually pass it eventually, you’ll have to tune in to find out”
I have a feeling that this is going to be used more for demonstrating to friends how to do something rather than becoming a serious competitor to Twitch. I’m curious to know whether Steam offers any of the notification and presentation tools that Twitch and streaming software offers. I know many people won’t use it if you can’t put your face and a bunch of extra crap all over the screen while they scream and make pop culture references. /socialCommentary