Twitch Removes Playroom From Stream Directory

Bit of a bummer, but you can't count out human nature to act like this.

"A couple got drunk on camera, and the women not only passed out in front"

Don't give the guy too much credit @patrickklepek, it was only 1 woman.

I always wonder with comments like this. Me not wanting to do things such as these people, am I less human?

Thanks. :)

well, I'm glad it didn't escalate and stayed at a horribly pixelated breast. It is still a disgusting move to expose your own wife on the internet but at least no full on Uno-like incidents.

There's always one person who has to ruin it for everyone!

This actually sounds like a decent solution. Not going too far and not overreacting.

This is why we can't have nice things!

It's a smart move for now. Streaming through Playroom could easily be abused in many, many ways that I'm sure no one at Twitch wants to deal with, and it's probably making Sony do some rethinking, too.

This is why we can't have nice things.....

This is why we can't have nice things, few ruin it for the many.

I'm so glad Spartan Show took off initially before the bad stuff did .

It can be so easy to forget all the good things about the Internet and the services we enjoy because of it when we're exposed to so much of the negative it can also bring - Spartan immediately showed and continues to show why such a feature is worthwhile.

It's a shame that all the good things to come out of Swapnote didn't save it, but I'm also not entirely sure what Nintendo could have done any differently when faced with what happened.

You people disgust me.

Carry on.

Just read today's Penny Arcade and now I understand it haha, thanks Scoops!

and now...........it's the Kinect's turn.

It's such a shame. Also I find the fact that nothing seems to have happened with Uno on the 360 very disturbing.

Of course not. The people who DO want to do things like forcibly expose their unconscious partners are in the VAST minority -- it's just that, with a literal world-wide web, their shitty actions are viewable by all.

I tried calling in to the Spartan Show from Australia but no luck :/ I actually wanted to talk nerd with him (I prefer the DS3 sticks to DS4) and that was the whole point of his episode! Stick swapping.

I'm all for both Sony and Twitch airing on the side of extreme caution.

Despite the fact that it's maybe "not for me" this is a great new feature and if these companies have to slow things down to make sure they don't get villainized and subsequently axed I say "take your time and figure it out".

I'm less concerned about "kids seeing horrible internet stuff" and more concerned about someone seeing themselves on the internet. We all know this won't be the last or worst case if things aren't moderated in some way.

What a shame, but not unexpected. The idea of streaming made easy was so fascinating that I was going to give it a try myself, but people had to ruin this, of course. Good on Sony for reacting quickly to the situation.

Too bad. Playroom is probably the best thing to come out of this new generation of consoles.

The things we do "for the children"

Was expecting something like this to happen, glad they've said they may come back to it eventually. While it's a very cool idea and lead to some neat things, like the Spartan Show call in show, I've noticed most of the super creepy stuff seems to keep popping up to the top, such as the most popular channel a few nights ago being nothing but a girl commenting on the rude comments chat was flooding her with.

It's easy to blame garbage people for ruining this for the rest of the world. But the forum was created by Sony and Twitch. Them not seeing this coming a mile away is blind to a worrying degree. It highlights a feeble understanding of the internet, and people in general. And their solution is to burn the whole thing down as soon as it gets a little bit dangerous. They had something potentially interesting on their hands, too bad.

I don't understand why Sony completely pulled the plug on a cool concept. Why doesn't Twitch or Sony just pull down, suspend, or ban streamers with nudity or other TOS violations? You can just as easily stream a PS4 game with your dick in the corner. Or just stream on your PC doing whatever you want, gaming related or not. If people are abusing it or putting up inappropriate stuff, you ban them.

Hopefully this is just temporary while they work out some sort of curation, community policing, or monitoring/reporting system and respond to how people are using streaming and stream watching services.

@deathpooky: Sony didn't pull any plug, this was all Twitch. Sony has remained pretty quiet on the whole thing

@patrickklepek "But, sadly, it got gross." may be better expressed with something like "In a separate incident, things got gross."

For people reading about this for the first time, the current phrasing may make people think that friends of the first, adorable couple came on The Spartan Show and exposed themselves. And the first couple are already indelibly linked enough with the skeezy couple without that.

Sony are not behind the non-archiving of Twitch streams either. Twitch are. And this is a non-issue. Twitch have banned and blocked people of non-huge names and associations for running a few minutes looking like a non-game stream.

If they block and ban when somebody airs a PlayRoom pong championship, then we're talking dumb things.

@shortbreadtom: Well then same question for Twitch, probably even worse. People can stream garbage on Twitch through other means just as easily as they could on Playroom. Not sure why they pulled the streaming entirely instead of just suspending the offending accounts and letting people know that inappropriate content will result in bans.

Ever wonder why nice guys are single and guys who expose their drunk wives on public internet broadcasting are married? I wish women would make better choices...and guys would smarten the f@ck up...

@deathpooky: If I'm understanding it correctly, they still haven't pulled the plug. All they've done is removed the "so-and-so is now streaming Playroom". You can still stream Playroom, it just won't be listed as such so it's nigh on impossible to find. For what it's worth, I agree with you though. I don't see how this is different from people just webcam streaming porn, and I think that account banning and suspending is a much better solution. My completely uninformed thought would be that this is just temporary until they either find a better solution, or the next generation is no longer the centre of attention so they'll be under less scrutiny.

Guess the fun's over. The Tika drama was one of the most amazing things I've seen on Twitch.

As a nice girl who has never been in a relationship?

No. No I don't wonder.

Seriously though, what kind of scumbag thinks that stripping their unconscious significant other on camera while it's being broadcast to the Internet is a good idea? Being drunk is not an excuse for that shit, and the fact that removing your inhibitions would take you there says a lot about how mental you must be. If I was that guy's wife, I would be seriously reconsidering this relationship.

Why would anybody want to watch video games being played by anyone but Giant Bomb?

Bet the person who decided to remove it was Horror. Even on the way out he ruining fun on the internet.

Well, something like this doesn't really come as a surprise. I doubt that Playroom streams will actually make a comeback.

Luckily they nailed that Lostprophets band guy before PS4 came out

Hm... a question, @patrickklepek : do you really think the PS4 is a youth-targeting device? Sure, kids will be getting them but it seems a lot off games marketing targets people in their 20's and 30's.

I think the bigger deal is that what went down was just really bad, period.

So. it's kind of like when Reddit got heat for looking using the photobucket exploit and just moved it to another subreddit.

Parents, no where to be seen anymore. Anyone old enough not needing supervision, naked people, who gives a F.

I really don't see how either Twitch or Sony could do much to prevent the 'bad stuff' other than to give harsh punishments after the fact. The very nature of streaming means that anything which happens occurs live, in the here and now, when it first makes it onto Twitch and something like this could have (and likely has) happened long before PS4 integration since all it takes is a webcam.

The only solution I can really think of to this which would not be meaningless nor possible to abuse would be to have Sony and/or Twitch hire 'Playroom Moderators' to jump between streams specifically for Playroom to make sure nothing is getting out of hand, but even this only takes a single moderator abusing his/her power to shut down a stream for little or no reason or a moderator being too lax/careless and not shutting down something which definitely should have been and the entire Internet would go up in a firestorm of rage.

Stepping back a bit for the time being is still definitely the best move, but I can't think of much that could be done to keep people happy and keep streamers in line.

Is there something about the PS4/Twitch setup that doesn't allow a user account to be banned if they are not living up to Twitch's TOS? It seems like throwing the baby out with bathwater, the bathtub, and the entire line of similarly branded bath accessories over a problem that his a simple 1 to 1 violation solution.

I will just leave this here. Goodbye, Sweet Memories.

Also @patrickklepek "uncharted" territory i see what you did there.

That's a surprisingly reasonable solution. They don't lose the feature, just the exposure (har har).

Hell one guy getting his wife naked on cam isn't why they removed it. Nudity was a pretty rare case in the whole course of things. It's because those streams were bumping into massive viewership with content that was essentially a live chat while the streamers kicked some robots around. But then looking at the wider scope of twitch I don't know why people aren't pointing out the hypocrisy of the decision when a good chunk of popular streamers consist of a camera pointed at a woman's cleavage while a game goes on in the background. Moreover there's absolutely no sense to champion the Spartan Show who, in turning it into a damn call in show, was they the biggest culprit of it all.

It's not a part of a human's nature to want to do a specific thing, it is part of the nature of living with humans that someone somewhere will do that specific thing.

It is not human nature for you to want to do this, it is human nature for this to happen.

The piece didn't cover this, so I'll ask.

Does Ustream allow Playroom streaming?

At least Ustream is still around, I hope that couple does more of the Spartan Show, I really wanted to see it.

The best playroom stream was the guy smoking joints and talking about life while the little robots cheered him on.