Twitch: first impressions

Some days ago Max and me had the crazy idea to publish our full-body virtual reality game experiments on Twitch. The idea turned out to be great, since now we’re on first, second and third position if you search for “Oculus” on twitch! (wow, a whole podium!) If you lost our last broadcast, well, you can still found it here or in the highlights here.

I know since a lot about Twitch, but I never streamed to it and never had even a look to it. So, today I wanted to try this famous website, to have my own opinion and be able to write it to you.

First of all… what is Twitch? Twitch is probably the most famous platform for streaming e-sports. It has born some years ago, created as a spin-off of Justin.tv (do you remember that old website where you illegally followed sport matches, but the resolution was so low that you could hardly tell the ball from the field? Pepperidge farm remembers!) In twitch you can stream yourself while you play and let other people follow you, or you can watch other people play any kind of games. There are people for which this has become a full-time job, because they earn a lot from twitch subscription, donations and sponsorships (I’m such envious…). You can find a great description of twitch on wikipedia, of course.

Today I spent an hour on twitch. The interface is very simple and neat and you can use the search widget to look for your favourite game. There are streams for any kind of games: action, sport, adventure, card, virtual reality, etc… In my short experience, I just looked at:

• Soccer games (PES, FIFA);
• Poker (online tournaments);
• Starcraft II (I love this game);
• Resident Evil 0 (I love this one, too).

I enjoyed this time a lot and I think that twitch can become another great procrastination reason for my everyday job (maybe it has not been a great idea to try it, after all). There are mainly two kind of gamers there and you enjoy them for two different reasons:

1. Good and nice gamers: these are people that are not super-pro gamers, but just random skilled guys. They play their favourite game, maybe with some pop soundtrack and in the meanwhile interact with their followers, reading the chat and answering them in a funny way. Looking this kind of players is good because it’s like going to a friend’s home and looking at him playing some computer game while talking and having fun together. So, it’s the “forever alone” version of having a friend to play with 🙂 .Alex, Resident Evil player, was one of this.

   

2. Super-pro gamers: Champions of e-sports, making official or non official matches. These are the kind of gamers that if you meet during a multiplayer match, are capable of killing you just 1.3sec after your respawn, just using a toothpick and a rotten tomato. You look this matches just to say “ooooh” looking at their speed and their skills. Sometimes, if they’re playing some official tournaments, you can also have the commentary of specialized journalists, as in every other kind of sport. I had a look to a one-to-one match in Starcraft II and I was really amazed by how the Norvegian player just destroyed his opponent in few minutes with a nasty zergling attack

   

There are other kind of videos, like development ones (like ours) and review ones (I found one explaining the new PES features). You can also use the streaming to make new friends, learn how to play a game (like Poker videos are very useful to learn pro-gamers tactics) or just use the videos as an excuse to learn another language: I watched some Chinese people playing FIFA and I justified myself saying that it was useful investing this time to improve my Mandarin skills 🙂

So, from my short experience now I understand why twitch has become so successful: watching other people playing can be funny, relaxing and really entertaining. The choice of different games to see is so big that you can surely find someone that you like and that you can spend hours looking at without even noticing the time passing by. So, Twitch is approved, and surely we of Immotionar and NTW will come there again to stream our VR experiments!

And you, do you like twitch? Let me know in the comments (and if you liked my post, don’t forget to share it :))