Prior to the holiday break we mentioned a second, larger update slated for Spring. That content release will feature a significant Light increase, a bunch of new gear to earn and equip, and new challenges for PvE players seeking some more fun experiences and replayability.
Beyond that, the team is focused on delivering a large expansion later this year, and a full Destiny sequel in 2017.
Make up your minds.
Expansions or no expansions? You have made a technically proficient game that appears to be planned completely at random.
If you are a Mac user and haven’t checked it out yet, OpenEmu is hands-down the best emulation solution that exists on any platform. I wish Windows had something half as good.
And it hit version 2 tonight.
Revision notes are here, including several new systems that have been moved out of the experimental build into the core release.
Stuff like this is definitely one of the reasons I play, watch, and love fighting games. The Capcom Cup was some of the most intense competition I’ve ever watched—and a fitting farewell to Street Fighter IV is its sequel releases next year—but this match in particular was so amazing.
(I’ll probably have more to say about Capcom Cup in another post.)
To see the match those above tweets refer to, here you go. One of the better matches, just because the two players in it are two of the best in the world.
It’s technically the third game in a series. The first, Namco X Capcom, was only released in Japan and never made it here. The second was Project X Zone, which seemed a longshot for making it to North America but later ended up doing so as a limited release.
It’s as good as I remember from my initial partial playthrough. An interesting mix of characters with a fairly thin plot, just to mash together various franchises.
I’ve been watching events and streams on Twitch for some time now, but it’s been during my sabbatical break from work that I’ve spent a decent bit more time paying attention to what’s out there and what people are streaming.
Because it’s my children’s summer vacation, they have often been sitting and watching with me, learning about games (especially the classics!) and just spending time with their dad while he has time away from work. And partially because of that, I’ve noticed something:
Twitch has a massive outbreak of foul language on an awful lot of streams. And it makes the service and consequently the watching of games as a leisure activity for kids something difficult to recommend as a result.
When I stream, I do what I can to make sure my part of the stream is family-friendly. No swearing, no inappropriate references, nothing that would make me embarrassed to have my own kids watching the stream.
I decided to do this not only because of my own family, but also because of BigJon, who is currently my only Twitch subscription because his content is always family-friendly and his speed runs are a huge hit with my kids. His dedication to being family-friendly and keeping drama out of chat is a big inspiration to how I approach streaming.
GameJ06, aka BigJon, probably the most notable specifically family-friendly streamer on Twitch.
A Hard Call?
I know it’s hard to find what that line is when trying to determine “family-friendly.” (For instance, what to do when I’m playing a game that has non-ff content in it, even though my own language and conduct would be family-friendly?)
But I’d love to see Twitch streamers change it up a bit and realize that we aren’t going to be able to inspire the next generation of speed runners, fighting game aficionados, or modders without providing them with streams they can watch with their parents and siblings.
My kids are heavily-influenced by the streams I watch. Because of BigJon, my autistic son is now super-into The Lost Levels. Because of things like Games Done Quick and Evo, which keep their commentary family-friendly (I think) on purpose, my oldest son has purchased Virtual Console copies of Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man. My daughter picks up the arcade stick once in a while and tries to learn Ultra Street Fighter IV and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
(Specific props to FGC commentators like James Chen, David Graham, Seth Killian, and skisonic, about whom I’ve noticed a tendency to keep the language clean even when crazy things are going down.)
There are lots of things I just won’t watch with my kids because the language is just too over-the-top–and I suspect it’s likely it limits the potential audience for lots of content. Several Mega Man X runners I respect otherwise are fountains of cursing. A runner I was going to watch who is playing through the entire NES catalog had to be turned off because the first sentence after I loaded the stream had two f-bombs in it.
I’m not anti-swearing. I think there’s a time and a place for it. But it doesn’t need to be in streams, and I want to think we can carve out a safe space for kids and families to be watching this content to engage and interest new generations in the games we love. (Not to mention the fact that it could have a significant halo effect in making the communities around these things friendlier to more people in-person.)
Teaming Up
I’d love to create a Twitch team that embraces the concept of family-friendly streaming. To find like-minded people and give them a place where families who want to watch together can find streams that would be language-free, non-discriminatory, non-sexual, etc.
Of course, there are problems with this, not the least of which reason is that I can’t create a team because I’m not streaming enough to build the audience one needs to be partnered (though time, we have time). :)
But there are other things to consider. What if I want to stream a Saints Row game (which is decidedly not kid-friendly) late at night my time, but I’m on the list and there are people either with kids up late or in a different time zone? How would you handle that? Splitting a stream into two streams isn’t always the solution to the problem because then partners wouldn’t get the full attention necessary.
And there’s the added problem that the non-web apps don’t support the team structure or (I believe) the mature flag on streams. (Thinking that members of the team could set the flag if they are streaming something not-appropriate.)
This is mostly thinking out loud, but it’s an interesting problem to consider.
So What Then?
In the meantime, I think the best thing I (and you, if you are interested) as a streamer can do is just make sure that I do what I can to keep my conduct family-friendly. If I’m playing a game that’s not, I can either turn on the mature flag or depend on viewers to know that what I’m playing doesn’t lie in that spectrum (and play later at night, of course).
I’m interested in your thoughts. What do you think about how family-friendly (or not) video game streaming is? Do you keep your stream that way on purpose? Do you think streamers shouldn’t care? Do you know of streams that are friendly that you’d like others to know about? Do you think this is important to growing the audience for this type of content?
Leave a comment on the post (all comments are moderated) with your musings.
YouTube came out swinging as part of the pre-E3 hype train today, announcing through a series of tweets and some PR pushed to gaming sites that they are launching YouTube Gaming this summer:
There’s a post on Polygon that’s largely regurgitated PR-speak, but it includes most of the information you need to know about the service. The last paragraph hits what YouTube thinks is their main competitive angle here:
Product manager Barbara Macdonald showed off YouTube’s improvements for livestreamers at today’s event, walking attendees through the streamlined process that only requires a few clicks to set up. YouTube Gaming will let streamers enable DVR so viewers can rewind live broadcasts, and a new low latency streaming option will let streamers “really interact with [their] fans while gaming.” Macdonald also promised improvements to chat moderation, something she’d said users had been requesting.
As a pretty infrequent and not horribly successful streamer on Twitch, here are some brief thoughts on the upcoming competition. (YouTube Gaming doesn’t launch until “summer.”)
The Twitch Advantage
Twitch has a huge head start and a dedicated vertical audience. And they have done some things very, very well:
They have a fairly robust app ecosystem that encompasses not just iOS and Android but also consoles and some set-top boxes. It’s pretty easy to consume Twitch content.
It’s also very easy to stream with Twitch, with support being built in to some games now and both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 having support for streaming built in at the OS layer. There are multiple app choices on PC/Mac for streaming to the platform, as well.
They have a chat and streamer community that (at least so far) isn’t overly toxic and tends to be pretty positive.
They have a great API and other aspects of the service (like chat operating over IRC) that give them a pretty broad support base within the developer community.
They make it pretty easy to find other content that you are interested in, either through game listings, channel hosting (where someone you watch can “host” someone else’s stream to boost their reach), and a featured channels list that is fairly well-curated.
They dogfood their own service and host various programs of their own—and a lot of their staff have been hired from within the community itself.
Major gaming events are almost exclusively streamed on Twitch.
They also have been doing what they can to improve things recently, with changes like reduced video latency to make it easier to interact with the chat channel, and the addition of more features to their mobile apps, which have been okay-but-not-great for a while now.
YouTube’s Potential Supremacy
YouTube has some potential to shake things up, though. Here’s what they need to do to snag significant numbers of audience and streamers from Twitch:
Good integration with their existing device app ecosystem (like on consoles or Apple TV).
An amazing mobile and tablet app that just smokes everything Twitch offers right now—which according to the language in their press so far, sounds like it’s a priority.
Low chat latency and the ability for users to write bots and other community tools that interface with things like follows, subscriptions, etc.
Moderation tools that don’t horribly suck for dealing with their notoriously toxic community.
Better console and app support for people who want to start streaming to their service.
Analytics and monetization tools that are easy-to-use and available to everyone using the platform. This is where they can hit Twitch the hardest. Twitch requires you to be selected as a Partner before you are able to make money off your stream or get good insights into your numbers. It’s kept the subscription-enabled streams at a pretty high quality, but if there’s a gold rush to YouTube the numbers will suffer.
Hiring of people within the community to represent streamers and viewers and be enabled and encouraged to participate in that same community as part of their jobs. Based on some other tweets from today, it sounds like they are indeed doing this.
YouTube’s biggest problem is just going to be making this a vertical that gets the right amount of attention and focus, while enabling content creators to moderate their communities to keep the toxicity at a minimum.
If they spend the correct amount of time and money on this product, I think they will have a success on their hands. And I think the best-case scenario is YouTube growing the overall game streaming community, not stealing numbers from Twitch. Competition is good!
The best response to this announcement came from Twitch’s Twitter account, by the way:
I know this probably isn’t much to all y’all but I had a pretty epic run in The Pinball Arcade on one of my favorite tables last night, and cleared a billion points on The Addams Family:
That ended up almost doubling my previous high score, and I managed it despite completely bombing Tour the Mansion. This run is pretty decent because I front-loaded the points; I lost two balls just trying to lock the third ball for multiball because of the stupid playfield magnets.
TAF really is a well-designed table; everything is in just the right position to demand some timing skill. Emulating it isn’t the same as playing the actual pin, but with our main local pinball gathering place closing at the end of the year, The Pinball Arcade may end up being all I have left. I’m happy the FarSight team is doing what they can to preserve the hobby digitally because a lot of these tables will soon start just being gone as more tables enter disrepair.
The day before that, I had a 600 million point-plus run that was almost all in the third ball; if you want to see that you can check it out as I was streaming at the time.
If you like what you see, please follow my channel on Twitch. I try to broadcast at least a couple of times per week. It’s not always pinball. :)
I love days like this one where we get a new site off the ground on WordPress.com VIP and I can finally talk about cool things I’ve been working on.
First, a little back story: In late 2010 and early 2011, I had heard that Major Nelson was looking to move from Telligent Community to another CMS for his site. I reached out via email and had some conversation with him about WordPress as an option.
Thankfully, the suggestion was a good one and he transitioned the site a couple of months later to be on WordPress, where it’s been ever since.
At the time, I’d brought up the idea of WordPress.com VIP as an option, but the time wasn’t right and instead majornelson.com ended up as a—still awesome—self-hosted site.
Time passes.
A few months ago, my colleague Nick Gernert posted to our team to note that we had reached out to the Xbox team to see if WordPress.com VIP was a good fit. It is, and for the last couple of months, I’ve been assisting with the migration and support for the new majornelson.com, which launched this morning in advance of E3.
Take a look! I think it looks fantastic—especially the podcast post views. They look really sharp.
And welcome to WordPress.com VIP, Major! I’m happy to be part of the team that will be supporting your site.
