What's that game called, "Don't Stop Moving?" That integrated Twitch streaming so awesomely? If this news means more of that, I'm all for it, I had a blast participating in that game.
Twitch to start selling video games this week
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#62Not sure how they plan on competing against Steam. Unless there was a way to pull off OnLive somehow on Twitch. I fail to see the significance of this announcement.
Steam definitely has a stranglehold on digital game purchases, but if anyone can break this it is likely Amazon.
Most of the value Steam offers Amazon/Twitch will likely offer over time (shared servers/friend status etc...). The supply chain that Amazon offers for physical games though would be nearly impossible for Steam duplicate.
Additionally, the general customer service experience with Amazon is phenomenal. If this is brought to Twitch, that alone is an improvement over Steam's treatment of customer.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#63I would be interested in seeing if streamers are going to see any type of affiliate profits from this since this is where all of the traffic is coming from.
From the article:
> The Partnered streamers who have opted into this new commerce program will earn 5 percent for the sales from their channel, Twitch says. The game publishers, meanwhile, earn 70 percent of revenue for the game sales.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord competes with Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, and Skype in the category of gaming voice chat, but it also offers an interface set up like Slack, which has gained popularity for topic-based persistent chat. It hits a sweet spot of good-enough voice & text chat that's cost-free, needs no configuration, is fully hosted with captive servers, uses decent codecs, supports inbound hyperlinks, has a slick UI, has offici…
Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for your WoW raiding or large organized clans, but it spread like wildfire among my friends who play League of Legends or Dota 2, and other games with medium-small groups of players. The fact that you don't need to install or configure any client (or even have an account) to bring someone in is the biggest single thing. People come for the easy invites and stay for the (slight…
Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for WoW raiding because it already happened. Discord doesn't have 100% of the market or anything, but it's definitely the most common.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have plans to address the fundamental unreliability of your chat? It regularly messes up message delivery (failed delivery, delivery multiple times, delivery out of order) at the slightest sign of network instability or server trouble. It's the worst I've seen from any sort of chat application, ever.
Yeah - there are more plans to handle more robust message retry logic. But it's a pretty hard problem to handle. Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though - although there are some rare cases where it can still happen. I don't think out of order delivery is possible as the messages are processed one at a time - but if you have a specific example I'd be more than happy to take a look.
Just FYI, I've had both out of order delivery and duplicate messages happen semi-recently. Duplicates are far more rare than they were, though.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#66Twitch 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…
Is curse social, though? I know they're a community, but are they a decent voip app? Their native client is garbage on the mac, at least.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#67Anecdotal evidence, of course, but nobody I know is using Curse, nor is it on our radar. TBF, this is probably due to a lack of interest in the group of certain games where the Curse client may already have a foothold, AND the fact that our group already has multiple established Discord instances (heavy use, most games) and a rented TeamSpeak server (for Arma 3 and the TFAR plugin for it, it does positional audio and dynamically handles per-user volume in each client to simulate radio channels and interference).
@jhgg - Can you speak on any plans to offer some sort of positional audio functionality in the Discord API? Perhaps you can use the existing game hooks available for the Mumble API's positional audio system? Being able to fully ditch TeamSpeak would be a big win for my group, and a disruptive move for you guys.
Additionally, I love just about everything about the Discord client, but I would like to see voice quality improve to the level of where I remember Mumble to be, though admittedly I haven't used that in a while, though remember it to be fantastic, barring network hiccups. I also have an issue, both on the desktop client and the Android one, where @notifications come in 'late', from minutes to hours. Furthermore on the desktop client, the notifications aren't always shown on screen, as a timer seems to be started before the pop-up is actually drawn, and something like the accompanying HDD activity during that timer lifetime can cause the timer to expire before the notification is drawn on screen.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#68On 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…
Valve isn't without its faults though. I've talked to plenty of people who are somewhat tired of the chokehold Steam seems to have on the gaming ecosystem. They may not be exactly destroying their image with mistakes like this past Christmas[0], but I imagine they're not fostering a lot of loyalty. [0] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-offline-after-secur...
As a longtime Steam customer, I've also grown fed up with what I perceive as Valve's attitude of complacency. There are numerous GUI bugs and usability annoyances on Steam for Windows that have long gone unaddressed - for instance, the lack of a "Confirm Order" progress spinner on the store checkout page, or the mobile app's inability to correctly load the Steam market "Confirmations" view on first try (always succeeds on retry, which I _always_ have to do manually). As an outsider, I imagine Valve's flat-org developers sitting fat and happy on their pile of Monopoly money, with little incentive to improve their current product so long as it keeps printing money. In this frame of mind, I'm happy about Twitch's announcement as it means Valve could finally see some real competition.
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#69> The games are available for download through the Twitch Desktop App
If it's not on Steam it's not on my machine. I'm not dealing with having to install more garbage apps
Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week
#70Discord 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…
I'm extremely surprised that Discord hasn't been acquired yet.
They recently hit 25 million users and have received more than 20 million in their last round. I think they are receiving some offers but maybe not big enough.