All posts by Radi

E-sports

Amazon Poised to Influence the Growth of E-sports

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E-sports is a growing industry. As interest grows in gaming as a spectator sport, we’re starting to see heavy investment in the sector, to the point that companies are considering purpose built arenas for e-sport events. Given the interest in the market, Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch and subsequently GoodGame, an e-sports advertising and talent agency, makes a lot of sense.

GoodGame is a talent and content agency that brokers deals between e-sports stars and brands that want to market in the sector. “We made a decision to become a full service agency, working with third-party teams and broadcasters to help them grow via merchandising, endorsements and custom content,” said GoodGame CEO Alexander Garfield. GoodGame also organizes e-sport events and manages professional teams.

In truth, Twitch acquired GoodGame, not Amazon, but it’s a clear move from Twitch to expand their offerings for both their talent and their content. The backing by Amazon may have given Twitch the ability to make this move, but the figures are undisclosed and it’s unlikely that Amazon was involved directly in the deal.

“The acquisition will allow Twitch to harness GoodGame’s unique service package, as well as its staff’s industry expertise and community leadership, in order to offer an even broader array of support and monetization opportunities to the greater Twitch community,” an official release reads.

Many were surprised when Amazon purchased Twitch; the rumors pegged Google and YouTube as the most likely company to acquire the streaming network. Around the time of the acquisition, ReadWrite editorial producer Stephanie Chan wrote about how Amazon had been investing in gaming, and that the Twitch acquisition was Amazon expanding horizontally into the video game space.

“Having a foot in spectator gaming is already access to a huge pile of revenue, and then to be able to have a direct line to integrated ads and games buying? The potential for earnings through Twitch, for now, seems limitless,” Chan wrote.

Given that e-sports is expanding radically, to the point of getting airtime on cable TV, Twitch could prove lucrative just in terms of revenue. If the company can leverage its power when it comes to digital games downloads and online video distribution, Amazon could have a hand in the growth of the whole e-sports industry.

Twitch

Miss Twitch Weekly? Get the VOD + Timestamps for January 16th, 2015

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Twitch had it’s second 2015 episode of Twitch Weekly last week, talking about topics ranging from the new Twitch Music Initiative to PAX South plans to much, much more! If you want to know more about the all of topics discussed – the super duper crazy awesome /r/Twitch user Jikkircraft (@Jikkir on Twitter) has put together a run down of all subjects + timestamp links to each of those sections! Check it out below:

Original Post by Jikkircraft

Intro

  • Twitch Weekly will be on at 3:30 Central Time next Friday live from PAX South!
  • Confirmed handsome quota filled
  • Hosts @djWHEAT, @SomaJT, @Fishstix, @Atrioc
  • Special guest – Chief Strategy Officer of Twitch,@ColinCarrier coming at the end of the stream
  • Shoutout to Jikkir – thanks guys! These will be coming on a weekly basis, so watch this space!

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Twitch Music Library and Music Category Beta Launch!

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PAX South 2015 – 23rd – 25th Ft. “PJSaltan of Stream” Competition

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Twitch Movie Night #2

  • Right after the stream, the next Twitch Movie will be “Pixel Poetry”
  • If you’d like to support Devolver, use the coupon code “TWITCHLIVE” at Devolver Digital’s website for 50% off all Devolver’s films

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AGDQ 2015 Recap

  • ~$1.58 Million raised for charity!
  • Nearly 1 billion minutes watched
  • The Twitch donation (this was calculated dependant on the maximum concurrent viewers) donated $8k to this event
  • Notch donated 10k like the boss he is
  • Shoutout to the staff at AGDQ – awesome community effort!
  • Happy belated Birthday wishes to Romscout

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Smite World Championship Finals now over!

  • Congratulations to Cognitive Prime taking the first ever Smite Championships!
  • $1.3 Million Dollar 1st prize
  • djWheat likes to dry himself off with $100 bills… Kappa
  • Smite spectator mode is unbelievable comparatively to other MOBA’s – huge shout out to Hi-Rez raising the bar in quality and production value despite their size!

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Paragon Orlando is the final Smash Apex 2015 Qualifier

  • Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene starting to heat up!
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee “5 Gods” being beaten by newcomer LFFN
  • Fox player
  • The winner of Paragon Orlando will be the final APEX qualifier
  • Mango didn’t seat for APEX at Beast
  • Click here to follow the stream!

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Twitch AHGL Sweeps Week One in CSGO, DotA2, LoL, SC2, HS

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King of the Nerds sneak preview of Season 3 on Twitch tonight

  • Premiering the first 30 minutes of the show 6PM PST

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Duracell’s Madden 15 “Longest Lasting Tournament”

  • Professionals from the NFL, and some of the [pro Madden players facing off!](twitch.tv/twingalaxieslive)
  • Patrick Willis for the San Fran 49ERS, Maurice Jones-Drew for the Oakland Raiders and Adrian Foster for the Houston Texans
  • 26 hour tournament (as long as Duracell batteries last! Get it?)
  • Top prizes include SuperBowl tickets, NFL gear and T-Shirts!

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*Major League Hacking (MLH) Weekend College Hackathon! *

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Remember to tweet questions each week with #TwitchWeekly

  • Chance to win free Twitch Turbo? Yummy!

Return of the Survivor Gamez!

  • For those who lived under a rock, think Hunger Games meets Day-Z competition
  • Survivor Gamez went on hiatus during December 2013
  • The conclusion of Survivor gamez 5 will be on February 8th, at 1PM PST. Follow the channel
  • To follow the map channel, click here!
  • Starting March, Survivor Gamez will have a qualifier free for all to decide the wild card team for the next main Survivor Gamez

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H1Z1 Early Access launched yesterday!

  • @djWHEAT is a psychic – knew in advance about H1Z1’s server issues!
  • Lirik held ~100k viewers just waiting to log into the servers – H1Z1 fans are clearly hyped!

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Evolve Beta has begun – partnered with Operation Supply Drop * XboxOne Open Beta released until January 19th * Check out the official Evolve Twitch channel!

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Twitch Partner Spotlight – LegendofLorie

  • Last week’s featured partner – Absnerdity Jumped in viewers significantly from 100 to 1000-3000 viewers
  • Each week a new partner shouted out in Twitch weekly!
  • Spotlighted partners have a significant chance of being featured on the front page
  • Are you a partner? Request and ask about this with a rep on the partnership team!
  • This week’s featured partner – LegendofLorie, Check her out!
  • VOD time of Spotlight – the chat jumps in to surprise her! :D

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Video Spotlight – TwinGalaxiesLive

  • This weeks video spotlight – TwinGalaxiesLive
  • Here’s the Spotlight video VOD
  • Submit and showcase your own video by sending a dropbox video to twitch.tv/twitch as an inbox!

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Staff Picks: Jimmy Wisenhunt – “Esports on a whole new level”

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Q&A Time

  • As always, I always recommend checking out the VOD for the Q&A’s – they rock! Questions will be below for a tease!
  • What in the Mason jars on the livestream desk?
  • What are some of the events this year that you guys are excited about?
  • How big is the Twitch staffing?

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Twitch Music discussion with @ColinCarrier

  • As always, I’d highly recommend watching the Q&A all the way through. There’s some awesome information in this one, and so much that even this summary will miss out a lot of it!
  • If you haven’t already, check out the landing page!
  • Colin mainly looks at the new endeavors that Twitch can do, or are just starting to look into
  • His CS: GO rank is Gold Nova 4 star… LAME!
    :P
  • Opened the platform to allow musicians to interact with their community and fans, as well as gain further publicity. It’s a very win-win program for the broadcasters and musicians!
  • Twitch music library offers music cleared of copyright ID for both live events and VOD’s
  • The goal is to have a library which caters to everyone’s interests – Electronic is far easier to clear rights for on a global basis, so there is currently a much larger selection of that genre in the library
  • Music contribution to the library currently requires a following of fans to ensure quality of the playlist
  • Content will be added to the library extremely frequently – hopefully weekly
  • Twitch will actively be attempting to incite larger artists to add music to the library and playlists
  • There’s a lot of Darude Sandstorm hints in here… Take it as you will… DUDUDUDUDU
  • A lot of comment about Colin’s general attractiveness
  • If a song is removed from the playlist, all previous VOD’s will be safe from Audio removal
  • Got feedback? Contact feedback@twitch.tv!

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Closing Thoughts

  • Don’t forget – next week Twitch will be live at Pax South at the time of 3:30PM Central Time on Friday!
Twitch

Twitch Chat Update: New Global Moderator Role and Badge

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To better define Twitch’s Moderation teams, notably roles and responsibilities, they updated Chat with a new role: Global Moderator.

A Global Moderator is basically a Super Channel Moderator: all the privileges of a Channel Moderator across all channels on the site. Global Moderators are volunteers who have extensive experience and knowledge of all things Twitch. Say hi to them and look to them for advice and support. That icon is pretty bad axe.

A reminder that Administrators, or “Admins” for short, are paid personnel who review grief reports and enforce our Terms of Service. In short, they help us keep Twitch safe and fun.

Twitch Chat Badges

For more on chat badges and what they represent, read this.

News

2015 Might Be the Year of Steam Broadcasting Versus Twitch

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Gamers will have to decide which streamers to watch

When I look back at 2014, I tend to focus on the video games that I have played or the news that might influence the evolution of the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4 in the coming years, but for a growing audience the past 12 months were the moment when Twitch video streaming has become more important than actually playing.

At the moment, there are personalities who broadcast their activity on the service and have massive audiences, but there’s also space for players who want to simply show how they experience their favorite titles.

Twitch is fast becoming a better way to evaluate a game than reading a classic review and major publishers are working to sponsor the channels with the biggest audience, while producing their own streams to show off features of upcoming releases.

Steam Broadcasting enters the fray

Valve surprised a lot of people when it announced that it was adding a Broadcasting feature to Steam, its dominating digital distribution service.

The concept is more limited than that of Twitch but it can be used to stream video game content (and more) to a smaller audience which is made up of friends.

Valve has not announced any plans to expand Broadcasting in 2015 in any major way but gamers can expect to see it play a major role in upcoming DOTA 2 tournaments or other Valve events.

Massive audiences versus smaller circles of friends

The common view is that, at one point, Steam Broadcasting will become a true rival for Twitch and that the two services will compete for a while, trying to introduce new features and to increase their audiences, before one of them becomes a footnote in the history of video games.

But I suspect that Valve is not aiming to create a solution for mass streaming but rather a way for smaller circles of friends to show each other gameplay and to comment on it.

Twitch seems to be focused on big audiences at the moment and the Steam feature can become important if it manages to become relevant for smaller groups, giving them easy-to-use tools to create content and to then share it.

The two can co-exist and the only downside is that a growing number of gamers will continue to watch rather than play in the coming year.

News

Dailymotion launches Twitch competitor for video game streaming

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Paris-based online video platform Dailymotion wants a piece of the video game streaming pie: the company launched a new live streaming service called Dailymotion Games Wednesday. The service basically tries to do what Twitch has been doing so successfully: Offer video gamers a way to live stream their gameplay so they can attract a big audience for tournaments, review games in front of a live audience or simply show off their skills.

dailymotion

Dailymotion Games is available on the web, as well as via dedicated apps for iOS, Android and for Sony’s PS4.

Dailymotion already sees more than 180 million video views per month for video game content, the company revealed Wednesday, adding that more than 11 million unique visitors tune into video game content every month.

But it’s likely that not just the own metrics prompted Dailymotion to go down this route: Industry leader Twitch not only managed to attract a monthly audience of 60 million video game fans, the site was also acquired for $970 million in cash last summer. Dailymotion on the other hand has had troubles to find an exit: The company was talking about selling to Yahoo two years ago, but French regulators put an end to the sale, balking at the idea that am American company would own more than 50 percent of Dailymotion.