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Twitch to start selling video games this week

techcrunch.com

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Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#11

Post by huac »

niftich wrote: post #8
huac wrote: post #3

Twitch Desktop specifically looks to be competing with Steam and Discord. Everybody wants to be the home of gamers, but somehow I doubt Twitch is going to break down Steam's chokehold on playing games (with Steam friends), but am only lightly skeptical that they can't put a dent into Discord's share of 'chat,' especially since Twitch and Discord share so many of the same principles, most notably strong anonymity feat…

Don't forget, Twitch bought Curse, a company known for catering to gamers: - the longtime Curse Client, effectively an addon manager that started for World of Warcraft but now supports games like Rift, Skyrim, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program - CurseForge, the community site behind addon hosting and development - the recent "Curse Voice" VOIP and chat client that is a direct competitor to Discord, and which got subsum…

Steam has so much value add beyond just its storefront, which is still the biggest in gaming. The community features are the most important - being able to see who's playing what and more importantly, being able to join their server, is not possible (yet) with Curse/Twitch. A lot of the Curse stuff is honestly little value, and if we're keeping track, implemented in Steam already. Curse Voice = Steam's in-game calls or calls over Steam Message; add-ons/forge = Steam Workshop.

I think that Twitch's streaming capabilities are going to be the question - are they enough of a differentiating factor to break people away from Steam and onto Twitch Desktop?

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#12

Post by legohead »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #5

On the one hand, it's great that there are more places to sell games and more ways for game developers to be paid. This can improve the ecosystem. On the other hand, Twitch manufactures its cultural bonafides. As opposed to Valve, who makes great games, Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games. Authenticity matters a lot to gamers…

From a dev point of view, the multitude of platforms is making it incredibly cumbersome to deal with.

Assume you make a game in Unity that works well both in mobile and desktop. Now you need to publish on iOS, Google Play, Amazon App Store (Underground or not?), Steam, GoG, Twitch, and Facebook. You may want to make a WebGL demo version for web portal sites as well. Each Platform has their own contracts you have to read carefully and not break.

To complicate it even further -- your game may work best as a paid game on iOS, but ad-revenue based on Android, and Underground on Amazon. These all require exceptions and finagling in the codebase.

Lets add some more complexity! "Gamecenters" -- Google Play integration, Amazon Gamecircle, iOS Game Center, Steam. Do you have Achievements? Steam has their own Achievements, as do all the platforms. Cloud save, Leaderboards? etc.

Now you make an update on your game..and have to export your game for all the various platforms and their special cases, and test them as well.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#13

Post by goeric »

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#14

Post by Legion »

orb_yt wrote: post #6
huac wrote: post #3

Twitch Desktop specifically looks to be competing with Steam and Discord. Everybody wants to be the home of gamers, but somehow I doubt Twitch is going to break down Steam's chokehold on playing games (with Steam friends), but am only lightly skeptical that they can't put a dent into Discord's share of 'chat,' especially since Twitch and Discord share so many of the same principles, most notably strong anonymity feat…

Keep in mind they acquired Curse, so are very likely looking to go after part of Discord's market share.

I hope their efforts involve an overhaul of Curse, because Curse's UI is the #1 reason I use Discord.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#15

Post by huac »

mtgx wrote: post #7

Time for YouTube to partner-up with Steam and allow Steam affiliate links and/or buy buttons, before it's too late and all the major gaming streamers on YouTube move to Twitch? Speaking of monetization models, YouTube is also leaving a lot of money on the table, or will soon enough, when it comes to podcasters that right now are forced to use subscription services such as Patreon to fund their channels. Why doesn't Y…

Twitch has monthly 'subscriptions' for popular streamers (roughly 300-500+ concurrent viewers, from what I've heard), at $5/mo, and Twitch takes some portion of that. They are pretty good at monetizing.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#16

Post by KineticLensman »

The article doesn't mention it, but I guess this is related to Amazon's new Lumberyard game engine [1], a "free AAA game" that is deeply integrated with twitch. The Lumberyard FAQ explicitly says "Lumberyard is free, including source. We make money when you use other AWS services", presumably Amazon GameLift

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#17

Post by jerf »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #5

On the one hand, it's great that there are more places to sell games and more ways for game developers to be paid. This can improve the ecosystem. On the other hand, Twitch manufactures its cultural bonafides. As opposed to Valve, who makes great games, Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games. Authenticity matters a lot to gamers…

"Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games."

Other than maybe that last one, and that depending on what it expands to in practice, it is not clear to me why I'm supposed to somehow consider these things a bad thing. Hosting, creating, and engaging with community doesn't seem like "manufactured" cultural bona fides if the effort is real and substantial. An accusation about "manufactured" cultural bonafides would to me involve trying to project an impression of greater involvement than actually exists, not doing a lot of real involvement.

Am I missing a nuance you are trying to communicate here?

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#18

Post by OSButler »

Especially on consoles, there are a lot of platform specific exclusive in-game items/missions/cosmetics/... and I'm wondering if this starts to become more common for the different PC release platforms as well.

Twitch Prime provides some exclusive in-game items and steam has had exclusive cosmetics in the past as well already, so while having multiple venues to purchase your PC games from is always good for the market, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in a console-like situation where the exclusive addons are setting apart the games on the individual platforms.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#19

Post by niftich »

goeric wrote: post #13

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumb…

Amazon doesn't need to buy Discord because Curse/Twitch has close-enough feature parity and if they successfully get enough people to install Twitch Desktop for some reason (there are reasons more than just chat, like streaming), some portion of people will switch or run them concurrently. They don't need to hurry, they can siphon marketshare from Discord passively instead of actively.

On the other hand, this move makes Discord an attractive acquisition target who's looking to counter Amazon by pursuing the exact same market with a very similar integrated offering, and who thinks they can buy the market- and mindshare without users fleeing afterwards.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#20

Post by chatmasta »

legohead wrote: post #12
doctorpangloss wrote: post #5

On the one hand, it's great that there are more places to sell games and more ways for game developers to be paid. This can improve the ecosystem. On the other hand, Twitch manufactures its cultural bonafides. As opposed to Valve, who makes great games, Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games. Authenticity matters a lot to gamers…

From a dev point of view, the multitude of platforms is making it incredibly cumbersome to deal with. Assume you make a game in Unity that works well both in mobile and desktop. Now you need to publish on iOS, Google Play, Amazon App Store (Underground or not?), Steam, GoG, Twitch, and Facebook. You may want to make a WebGL demo version for web portal sites as well. Each Platform has their own contracts you have to r…

At least you can reuse most of the code thanks to unity support. For any other app, until very recently with react-native, you had to create separate code bases in totally disparate languages just to target the three major platforms (iOS, web, android). And let's not pretend react-native is a panacea; there's still plenty of work required for cross compatibility especially if you want to use cutting edge features.

Walled gardens and market fragmentation drastically increase the cost of app/game development. It's hard for small or single-person dev teams to produce properly multi platform apps. It's sad to think about how much engineering is wasted replicating identical features across platforms, just for the right to play in the walled gardens of our technological overlords.

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