The immensely popular
PC gaming service Steam is launching its own live streaming service so that
users can easily share their game playing footage.
Named Steam
Broadcasting, the feature will be a direct rival to Twitch, currently the
favorite platform for live game streaming.
Via a freely available
client, currently in beta, Steam users will be able to watch the games their
friends are playing or automatically broadcast their own gaming sessions across
the service.
Steam is the largest PC
games distribution service in the world, with over 100m users. It is effectively
a digital store, selling PC gamers, which users download and store on their
computers. However, like console services such as Xbox Live and PlayStation
Network, it also has a social element, with friends lists and chat forums.
According to Valve, there
is a range of privacy settings allowing broadcasters to restrict viewership to
specific friends or to a whole friends list. Selecting “Anyone can watch my
games” will place the stream on the game’s hub area on Steam. Users will even
have the option to broadcast their desktop.
Live streaming is
becoming an increasingly popular element of games culture. Formed in 2011,
Twitch TV is the dominant platform, streaming content over the internet to
around 45m regular viewers. Anyone can use the service to share footage of
themselves playing games, but the site also hosts and promotes top channels,
which show major eSports events and tutorials by the top professional players.
In august, the site was purchased by Amazon for $1bn.
Currently the Steam
Broadcasting service is more limited than Twitch. Users can watch footage on a
variety of browsers but can only currently stream content from a Windows 7 or 8
PC, though support for Linux and Mac platforms is promised.
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