Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitch to start selling video games this week

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#91

Post by thegeekpirate »

jhgg wrote: post #47
kevingadd wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

> Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though

Happens to me incredibly often after I lose my connection while sending a message on Android 6.0.1

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#92

Post by Asooka »

devwastaken wrote: post #75
jungletek wrote: post #67

Anecdotal 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…

For twitch communities, Curse is very much on the radar, and they can get very large. Curse has full integration of various features streamers use, such as giveaways. No longer do you need to setup a whole bunch of stuff yourself, you can interact with your community in an official capacity outside of just the stream. Discord is a cool program, and I applaud them for how far they've come, but there are gaps in functi…

> When someone has to download a mod for your program to experience it better, you're doing it wrong.

I disagree. Your program being moddable and letting people customise their experience is a good thing. We're not talking about core features here, just customisation that varies from person to person.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#93

Post by jungletek »

jhgg wrote: post #73
jungletek wrote: post #67

Anecdotal 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…

Yo! We actually do support Volume + Pan in the Discord RPC - which will let developers implement positional audio. But this means that it'll have to be something that's implemented by game developers rather than how mumble does it by scanning the game's process memory to grab this info. https://discordapp.com/gamebridge https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/topics/rpc#setuservoi...

Hey, thanks for the info, I couldn't find it in the past.

I'll see if I can put it to good use, but it's a new challenge for me.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#94

Post by romanovcode »

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…

But it is so god damn slow!

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#95

Post by romanovcode »

tzakrajs wrote: post #45
xenihn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extremely surprised that Discord hasn't been acquired yet.

Its because the founders (on record) are adament about staying independent. I am sure they have been seeing plenty of preliminary interest.

>adament about staying independent.

Everyone has a price. The offers were just too low.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#96

Post by tomw2005 »

Crespyl wrote: post #49
niftich wrote: post #40

Earlier 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…

It has recently become the ease-of-use choice for our RPG group. Being a mixed group not everyone is used to configuring clients etc. so the out of the box usability is definitely what works for us.

From the DM point of view he can still send us pictures, it is free and we don't really use maps so don't need Roll20 (or equivalent). Also direct messaging players secret messages is really easy and handy.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#97

Post by RubyPinch »

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…

I don't think I met anyone who didn't use curse begrudgingly.

- - -

If they are seriously aiming to compete only with Blizzard App, then I'd imagine them planning on failing then.

Besides, Steam and Origin also have VOIP and streaming capabilities, And Steam also has mod management systems too, so Curse is closer to steam than to battle.net

Besides, the UI is fairly close to feature parity with discord (much like how curse was) which is adding screen sharing soon http://i.imgur.com/SPPLZhi.png

So it does seem more closer to trying to compete against Steam+Discord than a battle.net

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#98

Post by shuntress »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #81
shuntress wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being "hard to touch" I feel like I must be missing something. My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards. Discord's browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text/voice channels (as opposed to Mumble's 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different gam…

I used to use Mumble and Discord's superiority in almost every regard is so obvious that all I can say is "you need to adjust your glasses".

I'll accept the 'adjust your glasses' for Discord's memory footprint. The fact that discord takes up 3x-10x more space than Mumble really isn't a big deal with a modern machine in 2017.

My real gripe is with all the small things.

Mumble can text-to-speech the names of people as they join/leave the voice channel.

Mumble includes timestamps on chat messages.

Mumble timestamps messages when users join/leave/mute/unmute.

Mumble has 'advanced' input options for voice-detection.

Discord doesn't currently do any of that. Unless I just can't find the right configuration.

For me, these small "Only notice when they aren't there" things are not outweighed by Discord's general ease-of-use.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#99

Post by NeeT »

devwastaken wrote: post #72
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…

>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. Time. Curse has significantly better community integrations. Discord has taken a long time to deliver on its features and lacks even the most basic (text channels per voice channel for instance). Curse already has video calls, its a significanty better replacement of Skype than Discord is. Many are migrating to Curs…

Our philosophy is to start from the streamer. Twitch and curse joined forces to provide an amazing out-of-the-box desktop experience for our streamers and their fans. Of course this competes with other products, but we do not view it as a zero-sum game

We still have a long way to go to deliver that experience and we are actively looking at community feedback on our launch this month.

Hubert, Founder of Curse now working for Twitch

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#100

Post by NeeT »

Legion wrote: post #14
orb_yt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We indeed have a UI overhaul coming this year. We realize that the current UI isn't straight forward and hard to learn.
Post reply on HN