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, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.
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 games in different voice channels but sharing links/images/unrelated messages in text).
How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?
It's basically a generally passable VOIP client with a Slack built in, which AFAIK no other VOIP service has really done well (including Skype).
The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persistent communications outside of games and VOIP, and this rolls all of that into one package that's really easy to use.
I had huge issues with Discord's quality when it was first being publicly used because I was on a latent/lossy connection at the time and it just repeatedly disconnected me and forced me to completely rejoin a Discord server over and over, which implied their engineers had no understanding that the internet is inherently unreliable. That seems to have been well remedied, so actually improving their software immediately puts it 10000 feet above Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc from my perspective. I've watched these applications stagnate over the years and it's bothered me pretty deeply.
This was a long time ago - back in alpha stages of the product. We've since made some pretty big strides to being resilient to network drops, packet loss, network roaming, etc... I was actually one of the engineers who worked on these. We've tested the client under some pretty inclimate network conditions (30% packet loss - high latency - extreme roaming [meaning your IP address keeps changing] - either due to hopping between cell towers, wifi networks, or a dynamic pool of IP addresses). It's super awesome to know these little behind the scene changes are noticed!
I still get more problems on bad connections than other chat clients. The biggest one is probably that messages get sent twice or three times when I have a bad connection (I just had this happen yesterday). Sometimes a message goes red but it's still been sent, and clicking "Resend" makes it appear twice. Another is that while offline (on the desktop/web client), I can't look at past messages, because everything is replaced by a loading screen.
No chat client works _great_ under bad network conditions, but I think overall I tend to try to avoid using Discord more than I try to avoid others when I'm on a bad internet connection.
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.
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 official same-name clients on mobile, has a web client, and the like.
Discord's rise helped by Microsoft's seeming neglect and confusing platform direction of Skype in recent years, even if Discord still doesn't have video chat. For messaging among people who know each other by name, Facebook's offerings are dominant, but for pseudonymous chat Skype remained strong until Microsoft vacillated between making Skype Windows' native messenger or a strong multiplatform freemium network that isn't plagued by an aging UI and the invasion of advertising. Discord won many users by organic word-of-mouth referrals from people who used to use Skype.
As for gaming voice chat, Discord is not as sophisticated as other offerings (edit: maybe that's the wrong wording; let's go instead with "not as configurable"), but offers a smoother out-of-the-box experience.
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 (slightly better than) good enough chat, voice, and community features.
My experience has been that Discord has utterly replaced TS/Mumble/Ventrilo for WoW raiding.
I'm sure there's plenty of guilds around that are still happy with their existing setup and haven't bothered switching, but my experience is that many have switched, and new guilds are basically only picking Discord.
Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for WoW raiding because it already happened. Discord doesn't have 100% of the market or anything, but it's definitely the most common.
It _has_ replaced TS/Mumble for ffxiv, voice chat for subreddits, other game communities. WoW is bigger and has more inertia, but the network effects are strong.
I can see it pulling away from pretty much everything except those groups that have spent lots of time on crazy teamspeak setups with lots of ranks, different overlapping groups and so on.
>> except those groups that have spent lots of time on crazy teamspeak setups with lots of ranks, different overlapping groups and so on
Is TeamSpeak an open API? Shouldn't be difficult at all to write an import tool to import a TeamSpeak server's group structure to equivalent Discord roles.
It isn't, and Discord's group structure is less flexible. For example, any rank with the ability to assign ranks can assign any rank below it. In comparison, a teamspeak server has different groups and people can only assign people to their own groups.
Ultimately, I don't think this is as much an obstacle to long term success of Discord. These kind of servers tend to come around because running TS/Mumble servers require expertise certain groups don't have, so groups tend to colocate over some overlap in membership, and may still be colocated over inertia even if the overlap goes away.
The example I'm thinking of is a server I'm still on which is nominally owned by a battlefield clan, but also has a ffxiv guild, wildstar guild, eve corp and minecraft server chat on it. Each of these are effectively seperate entities and need to manage their own permissions, and if they were setting up fresh now, they'd all be seperate discord servers. The battlefield guys have some crazy rank structure based on time on the server or some such, the ffxiv group just has admin or not, and the minecraft group is a yes/no access perm.
The colocation is particularly not ideal as the battlefield clan and minecraft server tend to bring occasional DDoS attempts on the server, and there's not really much overlap in membership nowadays.
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.
Good UI, cloud based, no servers, slick UI, integrated (good) chat, invite links, solid quality, and free.
Mumble is a solid product but there's a lot more friction. First you need to host a server, and for most people that means paying for it. And then to get people to join they have to install a client, and the website can be confusing, and it's not clear which version they need to install, and it keeps prompting you to update which requires it to restart, and the client's UI is clunky, and the integrated text chat is very poor. And then when I need to join someone else's Mumble they have to tell me the host...and the port, and I've got to copy and paste it and go through Mumble's annoying UI to add another server, etc., etc.
Plus Discord's chat is good enough that it makes sense to start building small communities around it; it's also competing with Twitter group chats, Facebook groups, etc. I play World of Warcraft, and some guilds have started using Discord as their main "hub", instead of forums or whatever. And then there's the bots, and the emoji support, and so on, and so forth. Mumble competes pretty well with the core of Discord, but Discord does more than Mumble.
Ultimately, I think it's the same "why did Slack get so big when it's just IRC with some of the irritations filed off and a slightly better UI" question all over again. If you take a product people need, and make it very slightly better and really easy to adopt, then it's not surprising that it will get huge. Yes, you could technically use IRC instead of Slack, but there's a reason why a ton of companies adopted Slack but never adopted IRC.
Pretty much, except it's a horrible hub since there's no indexing of the content. It makes as much sense as trying to run a company through Snapchat.
It's bad enough that, even disregarding Discord's hilariously incompetent voice chat, Mumble will be a hard requirement the next time I'm looking for a new guild.
It's free. That's the only reason it's hot right now. Mumble/TS are superior, but cost money. Ventrilo is very expensive and Skype sucks (for gaming).
Don't get me wrong, Discord is a pretty solid product, but the only reason it has such a huge market share is because it's burning VC money and offering its services for free.
Because Discord is so extremely easy to set up and get going. In the past, we either used skype, or one of us would set up a mumble server, but Skype has gone to complete shit lately (like, oh, you can't make a group call if there are more than 20 people in the room, even if most of them aren't online) and mumble requires devops-level skills to set up. Discord, in comparison, is just "download this file, click new server, done". I do feel disgust about how it's a hundred megabytes of a bundled browser with mountains of javascript, but it works so much better than anything else. And it works on Linux and Mac just as well as it does on Windows, which is more than you can say for Skype. If it ever also gets P2P file transfer, it would be the absolute undisputed best chat program in existence.
Mumble never really took off, so Discord was competing against Teamspeak and Ventrilo, both of which stopped innovating long ago. Discord came in with a great design, good voice quality, low barrier to entry (free, browser client), and enough settings and features to make it viable.
It's really popular with the Twitch community now, but Discord has been a solid alternative to Skype for a very long time. The twitch integration is relatively recent.
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.
This has not been my experience. Mine experience has been seeing total fragmentation around chat apps for awhile with Skype, Teamspeak, Curse and Discord.
Now it seems most players I encounter have both Curse and Discord installed and will use the URL share feature that both have to share team invites for one or the other.
With them generally being used for gaming and now the acquisition and integrations happening between Twitch and Curse I suspect over time we will see Discord go the way of MySpace if they don't find someone to sell to and soon.
My experience was that Ventrilo, Mumble, and Teamspeak had the market split between them, then Discord took it over. It's been months since I've heard of anyone using anything other than Discord, and I've never even heard of someone using Curse's client.
(Disclosure: My experience focuses on the WoW and to a lesser extent Overwatch communities, mostly in the Oceanic Aus/NZ region. But in those communities, Discord is utterly, crushingly dominant.)
Coming from the ANZ Overwatch community here as well, Overwatch has pretty much completely taken over any voice communications platform that isn't just in-game voice.
I use Discord every day and I disagree with you. I will go wherever the communities I interact with go. If Twitch starts to incentive streamers to move their communities to Twitch Desktop, it is going to be difficult for Discord to do anything about it.
Of course, there are plenty of Discord servers not associated with specific streamers or related to Twitch. Those will be harder to touch but I don't think Twitch cares about them anyway.
It also depends on how well Discord maintains it's reliability. Servers have been unavailable more often lately and there has been increased latency. Still perfectly acceptable here, but it seems to be a growing problem.
By default, Discord allows any two people who share a server to direct message each other. Unfortunately, the baddies can use this behavior to send you stuff that you don’t want to see — everything from Harry Potter spoiler memes (Snape killed who!??) to much worse. To keep the baddies at bay, we’re adding Safe Direct Messaging.
I wonder why hasn't been a problem with stuff like IRC. At least, I've never experienced this problem, and I've been using IRC fairly regularly since 2006. Heck, for a few years I even hung out in various *chan servers. Have I just been incredibly lucky?
Amazon doesn't need to buy Discord because Curse/Twitch has close-enough feature parity and if they successfully get enough people to install Twitch Desktop for some reason (there are reasons more than just chat, like streaming), some portion of people will switch or run them concurrently. They don't need to hurry, they can siphon marketshare from Discord passively instead of actively.
On the other hand, this move makes Discord an attractive acquisition target who's looking to counter Amazon by pursuing the exact same market with a very similar integrated offering, and who thinks they can buy the market- and mindshare without users fleeing afterwards.
I disagree on the former, they absolutely need to hurry. But you're right, definitely an attractive acquisition target. I would say it would be a great fit for Microsoft.
>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 Curse because streamers use it, and it makes it easy and lucrative to do so as a streamer.
Unless Discord does something unique, like client side modding support and some cooler things you can do with servers, they're going to get crushed.
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.
What popular streamer has recently switched to Curse? Every streamer I watch uses Discord. Each and every one of them. I haven't seen Curse used in well over a year now. Curse finally got around to updating the UI and features of their client a while back, but it was too little too late. Discord had already won.
They recently hit 25 million users and have received more than 20 million in their last round. I think they are receiving some offers but maybe not big enough.
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 dynamically handles per-user volume in each client to simulate radio channels and interference).
@jhgg - Can you speak on any plans to offer some sort of positional audio functionality in the Discord API? Perhaps you can use the existing game hooks available for the Mumble API's positional audio system? Being able to fully ditch TeamSpeak would be a big win for my group, and a disruptive move for you guys.
Additionally, I love just about everything about the Discord client, but I would like to see voice quality improve to the level of where I remember Mumble to be, though admittedly I haven't used that in a while, though remember it to be fantastic, barring network hiccups. I also have an issue, both on the desktop client and the Android one, where @notifications come in 'late', from minutes to hours. Furthermore on the desktop client, the notifications aren't always shown on screen, as a timer seems to be started before the pop-up is actually drawn, and something like the accompanying HDD activity during that timer lifetime can cause the timer to expire before the notification is drawn on screen.
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.
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 functionality that have been refused implementation because 'not enough votes'. Basic things, such as being able to change font sizes, or have two columns of guilds, or actually turn off the 'blocked messages' pop-up that comes in when somebody that you've blocked talks in a chat you're in. (Yes, that's a thing).
When someone has to download a mod for your program to experience it better, you're doing it wrong.
Discord still lacks features even Ventrillo had, such as text channels per voice channel. You can't just send stuff to each other, you've gotta form another group, or use a public text channel in the guild. Thats the kind of problem Discord was made to solve, yet refuses.
And, as you said, Its not near Mumble quality, and due to the convenience of the program everybody just uses open mic. I can't join a community VC without it sounding like I just joined a group Skype call. With mumble, you had to look through the options and setup your mic, and a lot more people chose PTT.
For anyone interested in fool-proof PTT, just re-bind your caps-lock key to F14 (Scroll Lock), or some other special key on your keyboard if you have extra keys.
Effectively, Discord is just used for text channels, because the very thing they advertise, VOIP, is worse than the software its supposed to be better than. Give me Mumble any day for voice, and Discord for chat.
I encourage you to try our VOIP features in our Windows client. We have done a lot of work for audio quality that differentiates with implementations that just embed WebRTC into there clients.
We don't automaticly boost microphones because we assume most gamers have good mouth microphone and not webcams, we optimize latency with more aggressive packet loss concealment settings and a jitter buffer alorithm that prioritizes latency, and we've tuned noise reduction and echo cancellation settings to make voice activation a good experience for most users out of the box.
Hubert, Founder of Curse and now working for Twitch
> 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.
"TL;DR: Don't use third-party addons if you don't want your account to get stolen."
This statement started a campaign of users going around saying modding software is 'compromised', and saying they have all the proof, when the reality was that someone downloaded an external plugin /for/ the addon, which you have to move into a specific directory and enable. Exactly like a program, except you can read .js source. Yet, Discord itself allows you to just send people executables and script files, no problem.
It wouldn't be as big of a problem if Discord atleast tried to cooperate and take a minute to ask what was going on. If they did, they'd realize that the author of the addon is working on a version that restricts and whitelists things that could exploit users. Perhaps if Discord used their cult of personality for good, it would be done already.
You can mess with the styles, but its non-portable and will get removed on a reinstall or some updates. I like to be able to just make a theme and install it.
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 features.
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 subsumed with the mod manager into the "Curse App"
- Gamepedia, a wiki host for video game wikis
Together with built-in streaming and just enough social networking, Twitch Desktop combines the best of Curse and Twitch to create a gamer hub that has more value-add than Steam -- largely a storefront -- and is similar to the new Blizzard App (previously known as the Blizzard Launcher or the Battle.net Launcher).
Blizzard's offering streams to Facebook Live, integrates with Facebook login, has a barebones but recently enhanced VOIP chat, and is the competitor with the most direct feature parity -- but captive to a publisher, and outsources all streaming to a third party.
7 months ago when Facebook announced that they're building a gaming hub, I wrote [1] that I'm not opposed to some social-ness in gaming, but real-name-based Facebook isn't the network most people want to conduct their gaming on.
Twitch is a gaming-focused YouTube and pseudonymous social network that can now offer a featureful, streaming, social, and chat application for download, and they're backed by a corporate parent that likes to sell you stuff. This is a pretty good match.
Steam has so much value add beyond just its storefront, which is still the biggest in gaming. The community features are the most important - being able to see who's playing what and more importantly, being able to join their server, is not possible (yet) with Curse/Twitch. A lot of the Curse stuff is honestly little value, and if we're keeping track, implemented in Steam already. Curse Voice = Steam's in-game calls or calls over Steam Message; add-ons/forge = Steam Workshop.
I think that Twitch's streaming capabilities are going to be the question - are they enough of a differentiating factor to break people away from Steam and onto Twitch Desktop?
I probably buy fewer things through Steam than I do Humble Bundle, GoG, etc., but do all my gaming through Steam anyway just for all the other things it provides, even aside from social things like friends-lists and server joining.
To name a few: cloud saves, steam workshop, big picture, and steam controller.
Even if I dropped all the social features in favor of some other platform, I'd still be launching all my games through steam for those features alone.
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
Twitch Desktop is a bloated Piece Of Software that I believe uses Adobe Air. As for competition with Steam - if that's their goal then they're going to fail miserably.
Time for YouTube to partner-up with Steam and allow Steam affiliate links and/or buy buttons, before it's too late and all the major gaming streamers on YouTube move to Twitch?
Speaking of monetization models, YouTube is also leaving a lot of money on the table, or will soon enough, when it comes to podcasters that right now are forced to use subscription services such as Patreon to fund their channels. Why doesn't YouTube offer a more "built-in" alternative to that?
I'm not suggesting these because I want Google to be richer, but because I fear that one day Google will wake-up and realize that a lot of major YouTubers prefer doing anything but using its text and pre-roll ads. It could then decide to ban all of those people who don't use those exact type of ads that YouTube offers. So I'd rather they start adopting alternative monetization models that make it easier for Youtubers to make money the way they want to.
Twitch has monthly 'subscriptions' for popular streamers (roughly 300-500+ concurrent viewers, from what I've heard), at $5/mo, and Twitch takes some portion of that. They are pretty good at monetizing.
On the one hand, it's great that there are more places to sell games and more ways for game developers to be paid. This can improve the ecosystem.
On the other hand, Twitch manufactures its cultural bonafides. As opposed to Valve, who makes great games, Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games.
Authenticity matters a lot to gamers. Valve earned it. This affiliate advertising program would seem to undermine authenticity.
From a dev point of view, the multitude of platforms is making it incredibly cumbersome to deal with.
Assume you make a game in Unity that works well both in mobile and desktop. Now you need to publish on iOS, Google Play, Amazon App Store (Underground or not?), Steam, GoG, Twitch, and Facebook. You may want to make a WebGL demo version for web portal sites as well. Each Platform has their own contracts you have to read carefully and not break.
To complicate it even further -- your game may work best as a paid game on iOS, but ad-revenue based on Android, and Underground on Amazon. These all require exceptions and finagling in the codebase.
Lets add some more complexity! "Gamecenters" -- Google Play integration, Amazon Gamecircle, iOS Game Center, Steam. Do you have Achievements? Steam has their own Achievements, as do all the platforms. Cloud save, Leaderboards? etc.
Now you make an update on your game..and have to export your game for all the various platforms and their special cases, and test them as well.
At least you can reuse most of the code thanks to unity support. For any other app, until very recently with react-native, you had to create separate code bases in totally disparate languages just to target the three major platforms (iOS, web, android). And let's not pretend react-native is a panacea; there's still plenty of work required for cross compatibility especially if you want to use cutting edge features.
Walled gardens and market fragmentation drastically increase the cost of app/game development. It's hard for small or single-person dev teams to produce properly multi platform apps. It's sad to think about how much engineering is wasted replicating identical features across platforms, just for the right to play in the walled gardens of our technological overlords.
"Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games."
Other than maybe that last one, and that depending on what it expands to in practice, it is not clear to me why I'm supposed to somehow consider these things a bad thing. Hosting, creating, and engaging with community doesn't seem like "manufactured" cultural bona fides if the effort is real and substantial. An accusation about "manufactured" cultural bonafides would to me involve trying to project an impression of greater involvement than actually exists, not doing a lot of real involvement.
Am I missing a nuance you are trying to communicate here?
I dunno, Twitch has a huge audience they developed mostly naturally by being free, reliable, and having some nice features for both streamers and viewers.
I don't know that this translates to game sales, though, especially because the majority of Twitch viewership goes to F2P games.
Valve isn't without its faults though. I've talked to plenty of people who are somewhat tired of the chokehold Steam seems to have on the gaming ecosystem. They may not be exactly destroying their image with mistakes like this past Christmas[0], but I imagine they're not fostering a lot of loyalty.
As a longtime Steam customer, I've also grown fed up with what I perceive as Valve's attitude of complacency. There are numerous GUI bugs and usability annoyances on Steam for Windows that have long gone unaddressed - for instance, the lack of a "Confirm Order" progress spinner on the store checkout page, or the mobile app's inability to correctly load the Steam market "Confirmations" view on first try (always succeeds on retry, which I _always_ have to do manually). As an outsider, I imagine Valve's flat-org developers sitting fat and happy on their pile of Monopoly money, with little incentive to improve their current product so long as it keeps printing money. In this frame of mind, I'm happy about Twitch's announcement as it means Valve could finally see some real competition.
The article doesn't mention it, but I guess this is related to Amazon's new Lumberyard game engine [1], a "free AAA game" that is deeply integrated with twitch. The Lumberyard FAQ explicitly says "Lumberyard is free, including source. We make money when you use other AWS services", presumably Amazon GameLift
You get the full source to the engine, under a restricted license (roughly: you can make a game with it, modify it in the process and distribute binaries of the game, everything else is forbidden, you are not allowed to use it with services that are in competition with Amazons cloud offerings)
More or less. You are supposed to use it to make games that use Amazon infrastructure so Amazon can make money of that, but you could make one that doesn't for totally free as well.
(Of course their non-legal texts don't mention the "don't use Amazon competitors" clause all that explicitly, only explaining that yes, you can use it without online features or software running on hardware you own)
Ah, so this makes perfect sense. The parent comment is the most relevant one here, considering that amazon is banking on tons of (amazon only!!!) value being added to their distribution system with this engine. Kind of the same play they made (and failed with) with the Amazon App Market.
I think this is a great idea, do they also buyback used games as well? Right now I think the best place to do that https://www.bonavendi.com/s... because it does a price comparison for you on where to sell games for the most money. But if twitch took that over as well it would be crazy, they would have the best of everything in one place! Thanks for the update
Especially on consoles, there are a lot of platform specific exclusive in-game items/missions/cosmetics/... and I'm wondering if this starts to become more common for the different PC release platforms as well.
Twitch Prime provides some exclusive in-game items and steam has had exclusive cosmetics in the past as well already, so while having multiple venues to purchase your PC games from is always good for the market, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in a console-like situation where the exclusive addons are setting apart the games on the individual platforms.
What's that game called, "Don't Stop Moving?" That integrated Twitch streaming so awesomely? If this news means more of that, I'm all for it, I had a blast participating in that game.
Not sure how they plan on competing against Steam. Unless there was a way to pull off OnLive somehow on Twitch. I fail to see the significance of this announcement.
Steam definitely has a stranglehold on digital game purchases, but if anyone can break this it is likely Amazon.
Most of the value Steam offers Amazon/Twitch will likely offer over time (shared servers/friend status etc...). The supply chain that Amazon offers for physical games though would be nearly impossible for Steam duplicate.
Additionally, the general customer service experience with Amazon is phenomenal. If this is brought to Twitch, that alone is an improvement over Steam's treatment of customer.
I would be interested in seeing if streamers are going to see any type of affiliate profits from this since this is where all of the traffic is coming from.
> The Partnered streamers who have opted into this new commerce program will earn 5 percent for the sales from their channel, Twitch says. The game publishers, meanwhile, earn 70 percent of revenue for the game sales.
