Twitch.tv integration, do console gamers really care?

Considering the top 3 channels on twitch are consistently League, Dota 2 and Starcraft II, do console gamers really give a damn about twitch. I would think PC gamers would, but Microsoft seems to think this is a selling point. So what do you guys think? You gonna watch some Call of Duty channels or what?

Cheers

Streaming to Twitch from my console? Hell yes.

Watching Twitch on my console? Hell no.

@songwriter1987: I watch twitch every day for various things. People made it to their job streaming because of twitch. Each months millions of different people log in to this site. So yeah it is a big deal. Sony fucked up with Ustream but Microsoft got the jackpot in this regard.

They're including it because they know it's the future (well, the future borrowed from right now) and this console is going to last a long time. Even if console gamers don't see the appeal now, when it's there it will take off. Maybe it won't, but it probably will. Youtube lets plays are huge. It's just about taking that experience from the PC to the console. Changing the way that they view that same content. Except live, on your TV. It won't be an immediate selling point or benefit to the majority of people.

You would have to be pumping out some pretty special content from your console stream to come close to competing with professional 'casters. Even then, I don't know that there's a massive audience for "high-level" Madden play.

What professional content? People who make money there mostly stream games anyway. They have some nice intro but the rest is basically streaming games

Yeah, why wouldn't they? Sure, the top 3 channels are LoL, DotA, and SC2, but that's only a fraction of what people broadcast/watch on twitch. Hell, you could probably go to twitch right now and I'd bet a decent portion of the top 32 games at the moment are exclusively console games. The only reason it seems like a lot of console players don't care about streaming is that it's kind of a hassle to stream from a console for most people. With the new consoles, streaming will be just as simple as it is on PC which will bring in a lot more broadcasters and the ease of access from their primary entertainment device will bring in a lot more viewers.

I enjoy watching various you tube videos, but never got into the whole game streaming thing. For someone who doesn't know much about the situation, what makes Twitch so much better than Ustream?

@spaceinsomniac: Better overall quality. The possibility to get subscribers for your channel who pay 5$ each month to support you (Which you will get like 50% and the rest goes to twitch. Special emotes for subscribers, a ton of options for raffles etc. And if you stream a game you will do it on twitch that is for sure.

A lot of the partnered streams are at least semi pro and typically invest in good equipment to provide a high-quality stream. If a random stream isn't of a watchable quality then it's not going to attract viewers at all.

Besides, the most popular streams are specialized content, usually competitive play in mobas and Starcraft. It's apparently very difficult to build an audience out of "I play random console games." Successful variety casters are few and far between.

@rebgav: There are actually quite a lot.. You do not need 3k viewers to make a living out of it. The most important thing are subscribers and ads. And if you do it parttime you need maybe like 200-300 coherent viewers that is all it takes. You build up a strong community who is supporting you with subscribe money you can easily make money out of it^^

I'm going to shake my head and walk on by. O7

I'll never have any viewers, but I've always wanted to put more random dumb stuff up on Youtube, but not enough to warrant buying capture hardware.

I channelsurf twitch almost as much as I do regular tv (although I don't do both often). Watching streams has become a viable source of entertainment (e.g. GB, saltybet) imo, and it's really growing by leaps and bounds every year it seems. I'm glad ps4 is doing ustream instead though. Just cuz out of the big 3 of ustream/youtube/twitch, twitch has by far the worst quality/stuttery streams for me.

I like the interaction between the person playing and the chat. I also like Youtube videos as well.

Ustream is not as popular as Twitch. I just went to Ustream just to check it out. It is a mess. Twitch was made for games, Ustream has a variety of content. On Twitch you can browse by game title and a few other ways. Ustream needs a lot of work to become good competition to Twitch.

Definitely I care. I can't wait to get the feature. I would love to watch Halo streams a lot more, unfortunately they don't exist at the moment.

O yes it is a big big deal.

Sure i'd use it, so nobody can watch.

But watching other people play games that are not Jeff, no.

I think it's pretty awesome.

Most of my friends said: "What is twitch?" So I'd assume it will have it's users, but most people will be uninterested.

This. It is way way way way more important to have this support natively in console to push to Twitch.tv (or whatever service) while it is just merely "nice" to watch it on console.

This whole twich thing makes me feel old. The appeal of watching other people play games live is lost on me. Me personally I would rather just play a game like Skyrim than spend my limited amount of free time watching someone else play the game.

I can understand watching pro's play a MOBA or Starcraft, but every time I turn on twitch its people live-streaming random games like Recettear, or Slender Man.

My computer is not hooked up to my TV, and isn't going to be any time soon. Sometimes I feel like watching streams on my TV instead of watching shows or movies, but there's no PS3 app currently, so it's a no-go. Sometimes I even want to just take a nap with something inoffensive playing in the background, and commentary/narrative/gameplay sounds would be great for that.

@monetarydread: amen.

Listening to some nasally twat react to what is happening in a game I could be playing instead holds no appeal whatsoever

Microsoft are outsourcing the monitoring work to ordinary people. Every Xbone console will broadcast a constant stream of video to the site. Twitch users can sign up and get paid for watching for illegal activity. It's the way of the future!

Picking the top three games on twitch as an example of how console gamers aren't interested in it is just plain wrong, because not a lot of people want to make set ups for streaming their console games. With the twtich integration on X1 it will be a lot easier and you will see various games rise the ranks. The reason why it's not as popular now is because it really doesn't exist yet in its entirety.

But, I agree with some other posters on here, I think the whole idea of posting videos is kind of stupid. I don't want to watch people play games. Sure, if I do a really awesome combo or beat a really tough boss on some RPG I want to upload it. But I don't want to watch people play for hours. It has absolutely zero appeal.

I feel exactly the opposite way.

There are a few casters on twitch that I watch and enjoy on a regular basis. They tend to play games like Isaac, Meat Boy, Spelunky, stuff like that - they also have small, friendly communities and their chat channel is closed to the general public. They put on an entertaining show, they interact with their audience; you get to enjoy watching a good game and chatting with like-minded, good natured people on the internet.

On the other hand, watching a competitive multiplayer game stream with an open chat and a caster who is more focused on buffing his e-peen than presenting an entertaining 'cast is just the liquid shits. Fine for people who are doing their dota homework but not something that I'd choose to endure for fun.

It seems to typically be the case that new console or AAA games, especially story-based games, have a very short lifespan on twitch. You'd think that it would be easy then, for a variety caster to simply jump from new game to new game and keep an audience but that doesn't seem to be the case. The handful of console games which have legs tend to be competitive multiplayer shooters and I don't think that will change just because you add a bunch of new no-name streamers, I think that you would have to attract a whole new audience to cause a shift in interest.

If the Xbox brings in a hundred new viewers for every one new caster, then you might see console games rise through the ranks. If all it brings to twitch is thousands of new casters playing games that no-one cares about then it'll be kind of a waste of time.

A few dozen casters who currently cast on twitch won't care about this and the millions of people who actually end up getting these consoles won't give a shit about it, but it will encourage more people to try it out, but chances are, 99.9% of them will only do just that, or do it so irregularly that it will only be used as a way to show off a new game to a friend.

My feeling is that the people who are already "deep" into casting, already have better hardware and software to stream to twitch on or ustream then what these consoles can offer, so it's a waste of software development time in my opinion.

It would be cool if I can stream to/from my overseas friends without capture cards and all that. Not everyone is looking for hundreds of viewers, I assume.

Weird. I'm literally looking at it from the complete opposite perspective.

I don't know if I would say that. Doing a regular show on single player games would be hard in anyway it is handled where the most entertaining approach appears to be the "Let's Play" format but I wouldn't know anyone could sustain that for more than a few times let alone months.

On the other hand it would be fun to schedule a "I am going to play Beyond the Beyond and show everyone just how awful it is" on random occasions. Whether or not that should be a Twitch.tv thing or Youtube is subjective but supporting it without redoing your setup to support it would be nice.

This one doesn't. The share button and Twitch on Xone are two things I'll never use. They're like the next gen versions of Playstation Home and the HD DVD drive.

Except those are things that no one uses, the twitch thing will get used by Many many people even if you or I don't

@evilsbane: Will they? I can see people sending "Hey, check out this sweet headshot" videos to people on their friends list, but after the novelty of that wears off, what's the draw?

Absolutely. Even if all I watched is PC game streams I'd rather do that on my tv the my monitor. I think it's pretty rad they're including these options. MS definitely had a leg up getting twitch.

If it was limited to 30sec clips then yes but its not, its something that is going to take the difficulties of streaming consoles away and simply grow an already growing market.

I lost the amount of spare time needed to stream/watch people stream games long ago, so I personally care not one bit. I am told it is the future though. Which scares me slightly.

In June I believe I figured out why Sony didn't even approach Twitch. They've got a system going that lets a viewer press a button to give a health boost to the player as an example. Twitch has no viewer to streamer communication to enable that so they're out, uStream has it with their polling system so they're the ones they've gone with.

I couldn't care less.

Sharing are two proven, time tested features that will flourish on X1/PS4. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc etc are all proof that people are very interested in sharing.

I don't know. Maybe I'm underestimating the popularity of watching video game streams, but I don't see the majority of owners using these features more than a handful of times.

The only Twitch stream I watch is Giant Bomb's and I have neither the time nor the commitment to run my own. So, in other words, I couldn't give less of a shit.

Twitch streaming - for smaller streamers, or people just letting friends watch them play whatever, it'll be a good feature.

But for people who stream regularly, they will most likely still stick with a PC or laptop and existing stream software. it offers more control and more features - all the stuff with multiple cameras and green screen effects are all things many big game streamers make use of, as well as audio mixing and bringing in guests either in person with their own microphone, or over a voice client like skype or teamspeak.

I wouldn't mind watching it on my console considering I like watching Dota. I also like the option to stream my stuff too.

I believe it's 720 and locked at 30 frames, which is okay, I guess.

It'll be cool. Idk if I'd use it, but I'm sure some games will be cool for it, KI and other fighters

Did anyone ever care about the Twitch streaming in Black Ops 2? I don't know, hosting the stream from the console just seems like it will be pretty limited in options and no-where near as high quality as someone with dedicated hardware. It'd be really cool for them to prove me wrong, but it just seems like there will be an absence of audio mixing, the ability to have multiple feeds and easily resize them, probably lower audio and quality options, etc, and it'll all lead to a sub-par experience.

I'm a lot more interested in the 15 minutes of gameplay history thing Sony's got going on. Being able to easily grab clips retroactively without proper capture software is a lot more compelling to me than streams. I don't think streaming from the Xbox One on Twitch will be very popular, and subsequently the PS4s Ustream capabilities will be even less popular. It seems likely to me that the extent of usage will be to Stream something to a few friends, or if you're trying to set some highscore or do something really challenging, maybe you stream that to have it archived. It just seems like it'll be so much harder to generate an audience and be recognized in the ocean of boring gameplay-only console streams.

I don't see it as a feature that's going to interest me right out of the box, but I think it's kind of neat and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with it in the future. Who knows? Maybe I can show people they aren't the absolute worst at video games by showcasing some of my own awfulness.

The biggest disappointment about the PS4 is they didn't get Twitch. Huge loss.

This feature is completely irrelevant to me in regards to swaying my purchase decision, but I could certainly see it being useful for others.

On the other hand, if the features Sony's pimped for the PS4 turn out to work well, Ustream will suddenly be a worthwhile service.