Today, Valve quietly debuted what appears to be a new video game streaming platform, which could be a direct competitor to Twitch, called Steam TV.
Update (1:56pm AEST): It now appears Steam TV entered into this world a bit prematurely. The URL that was live just a few hours ago is no longer working and a spokesperson for Valve gave Kotaku the following statement regarding the matter:
“We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2’s annual tournament. What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public”.
Earlier today it came to light that the company had registered the domain Steam.tv after it was first spotted by Pavel Djundik, the curator of the third-party website Steam Database.
Hours later the site has gone from a blank webpage that simply read “Welcome to steam.tv” to a live feed of The International 2018, Valve’s esports tournament for Dota 2, its popular free-to-play MOBA.
Valve already allows live broadcasts of video games at the Steam Community hubs for various games, but Steam.tv appears to be a much more robust platform with chat integration.
Based on my short time messing around with it, Steam.tv has the ability to easily create groups for discussing streams with people you know based on your existing friends list, rather than being subject just to the ambient conversation of a bunch of strangers.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for more information about its plans for the platform.
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11 responses to “Valve Launches Steam.TV, Which Could Be A Twitch Competitor [Update]”
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God, I hope not.
It won’t be a competitor because Valve will release it and forget about it
Yup. It’s way, way too late for this anyway – even if they DID get fully behind it.
Not to mention Twitch is platform agnostic – which seems pretty important considering how many of the top Twitch games aren’t on Steam.
Given that twitch is now forcing ads back on people, this could actually work out for steam if they do it right, and that’s a big IF…
@transientmind I’m doing this here because an old article on a largely mundane topic is as close to private as this place will allow me to get.
What is wrong with you lately? This past few months you’ve gone from a good reliable and rational source of conversation and expression of ideas to this personal attack nonsense. This is not okay, mate. It’s not okay for you to insult people because they like something you don’t. It’s not okay to insult me twice, once for not expecting the game to be a disaster before launch (and I was right, it isn’t, based on my own direct experience playing it), and this time indirectly because I go to the fo76 subreddit.
You used to be better than this, and even when you’ve slipped up in the last few months I’ve always held on to the belief that maybe you’re just having a bad day. But this is starting to be a sustained thing over a period of time and now I’m genuinely not sure if you are better than this any more.
Maybe you don’t care what I think, and that’s fine. But I had a lot of respect for you over the years, and that’s steadily vanishing lately, and I don’t understand why. If you’re in a dive, you gotta lift yourself out of that, man. If you’re happy that this is the direction you actually do want to go, then that’s your choice too, but I can’t hold you in any regard if that’s the case.
I respect and appreciate your concern. It’s thoughtful, and I also appreciate that it can be personally uncomfortable to bring something like that up.
I’ll take that criticism on board for some introspection, with a quick couple notes that we do have different communication preferences – I put a lot more stock in actions than tone, and don’t attach as much weight to hyperbole and profanity as you do.
(Look at the recent news about the canvas bag from Bethesda – the ‘quiet, reasoned, even-handed’ tone got a, “Tough cookies, have five bucks of funny money,” response. Outrage? Outrage got momentum, and it got results. And action beats polite rejection any day of the week.)
There is one note that does strike a chord, and it is that while I god damn LOVE video games, I buy them regularly, play the hell out of them, and am enthused about many ‘near misses’ that I can find things to appreciate about even if I know they’re not for me, I am absolutely finding more and more these days that is angering me. Actual anger. Perhaps it’s a matter of age-induced weariness, a shortening patience for injustice, but I’m seeing a lot more greed in the industry, driving bad decisions, driving anti-consumer decisions, and it’s making me livid – not only that they dare, but that it’s working. It’s not being fought. And it needs fighting. And there’s a far more pressing, weighty parallel here: the fact is that this behaviour in this industry is probably driven by factors that are common among others in a broader political scale, negatively impacting our lives, if not outright dooming the human race… and that might be exarcerbating my reaction. Rising inequality, industrial relations worsening, climate change worsening, corruption worsening, the dismantling, erosion, and undermining of all the protections we have in place against all of those… Because voting every four years and letters to the editor isn’t cutting it and hasn’t for the last few decades, the only way I see forward is being louder and angrier. Getting emotional.
Maybe that’s carrying over to hobbies, and maybe it shouldn’t. Worth reflecting on.
Quick quibble:
How? How can you consider that the game has not launched as a disaster?
Real talk: Do you genuinely and honestly believe that just because you’ve got a high personal tolerance for circumstances that the reviewing audience, and the broader market, most demonstrably does not, is all that’s needed to disqualify it from ‘disaster’ status?
Insofar as it’s even possible to label a subjective product a ‘disaster’ in the first place, I reckon – genuinely, sincerely – that 76’s failure to deliver fits every reasonable criteria someone might set for what would constitute a ‘disaster’.
I’m not trying to tell you how to act, and I hope you don’t take it that way. That’s entirely your court. What I am is a firm believer that hyperbole is not necessary to effect change, and ditto for ad hominems. It can, the same way torturing someone can cause them to change behaviour, but I think there are better ways, even for situations like this: sustained, rational criticism including mention that what happened was against the law (bait and switch). I don’t think it was the foaming outrage that brought action on this, I think it was the legal advice they would have gotten after enough people told them it was illegal.
Again, I want to stress that you don’t have to believe that. That’s just my honest belief from my limited thirty-something years on the earth.
As for Fallout 76, I don’t consider it a disaster because I just don’t see anything that qualifies as that. I expected a multiplayer survival shooter with a less participatory story and the usual set of Bethesda bugs, the latter of which I’ve never considered a deal breaker. What I got was, if anything, better than I expected. The story, regardless of what you think of its delivery method, is more compelling than I anticipated. It has good solid answers for a lot of the lore questions gamers (myself included) had before it launched. The servers launched remarkably stable, considering the tech in use and Bethesda’s inexperience with multiplayer.
What you’re seeing of ‘the broader market’ isn’t representative, it’s the most vocal slice. I know from experience and I think you do too that the loudest people are the ones with complaints, you rarely hear from the people that are happy. Youtubers jump on the bandwagon because it’s an easy way to get a bunch of views and they already saw that effect with the first few videos people made (not all, but a lot of videos are like this). Publications are entitled to their opinions, but I don’t think they’re immune to the hate train effect either, and I think a combination of bad blood with Bethesda for cutting review copies and blacklisting places like Kotaku (which I agree they shouldn’t have done either of those things) makes for a bit of an opportunity to put the boot in more than an objective assessment would conclude. I don’t wholly agree with this review, but multiplayer.it (Italian) gave as part of its conclusion a description I think fits well, and a score of 7 which is what I’d probably give it too if I had to use a dumb numerical rating system:
Despite the noise, there are a lot of people that are happy – for the 60 odd hours I’ve played, I have always been on a server that’s full or within a few spots of being full, and I’ve never seen the same name twice. There’s a sizable audience of people who enjoy Fallout 76. You don’t hear from them partly because they’re spending their time playing the game instead, but a lot of it is the reason I don’t talk about it being a fun game anywhere but here – because anyone even remotely suggesting they like the game gets brigaded to hell and back. It happens on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, every social platform I’ve looked at has people getting downvoted like crazy simply for saying they like the game. It’s especially the case on r/fallout (who also notably hated Fallout 4, and FNV before it, before changing their minds later) which is why everyone that likes the game stays on r/fo76.
And that’s the thing about that subreddit. Sure there’s the occasional person blindly defending the game, but I read that subreddit every day and the vast majority of people there are just people who are genuinely having fun, who genuinely don’t see the disaster that you do, and who just want to hang out with people who aren’t going to bomb their karma because they like a game. The subreddit has been quite honest about the problems the game has, they’ve called Bethesda to task on the more outstanding ones as well as some great quality-of-life suggestions, and Bethesda has embraced it by actively participating in that subreddit – they’ve replied to people’s suggestion threads, bug reports, etc. by indicating if the team is already aware of a problem and if it’s on the cards to be fixed. They’ve apologised for having poor communication in the first week and a half after launch and promised to do better, and so far they’ve gone above and beyond in my opinion, part of which you’ve seen with the clearly laid out content for the next two patches.
I think No Man’s Sky was a disaster at launch. I think Aliens: Colonial Marines was a disaster. I think Duke Nukem was a disaster. They all drastically oversold and underdelivered, and they were all just plain un-fun. I don’t put Fallout 76 in that bucket. F76 is fun, everyone I’ve played together with loved it (we use Discord rather than the in-game VC since we’re all on Discord anyway). We all felt we got what was on the tin – not Fallout 5, just a smaller but multiplayer expedition into a different landscape. I think Bethesda was honest about what the game was from the start, and while I understand people getting hyped up over things they hadn’t said, I don’t think that’s their fault. I got what they told me it’d be, at its simplest.
Also, my criticism of r/FO76 has absolute merit. I don’t know if you visit that place, but search with r/FO76 for any references to r/Fallout and tell me what you see. There may be plenty of positive, happy folks trying to shelt from the media storm to enjoy what they’re playing and find some tips and share fun things with each other, but the negativity police are a cult-like downvoting force. As in they follow many of the red flags used to identify real life cults.
I’ve been poking my head in there routinely to keep tabs on the ‘magic bullet’ reason to buy another title in a franchise I love, but the rabid bunker mentality in there is real.
I forgot to add: Thank you. For being the better man.
I literally did the same thing and forgot to add that to my giant reply above. Thank you too, for listening and responding calmly. I have immense respect for that.