From the very first moment you picked up a controller, you must have had that one moment where you grab someone who is in your house and force them to see what you have just achieved. From completing Mega Man to beating Dark Souls, every gamer will have to have experienced that taste of glory and accomplishment. With online streaming now more popular than ever, more gamers seem to be willing to share their joy with the gaming community. With the PS4 and Xbox One both featuring online streaming heavily in the promotion of their products, it is only a matter of time until the established streamers are isolated from those who are trying to make their name.
The streaming community is never really something I have understood, personally. I do enjoy watching live-streams from time-to-time but it isn’t something which happens too often. With live-streaming being a key part of the next-gen console releases, I think it will soon become something which is a disappointment to many. The reason I say that is because at a recent event where I played the PS4, the amount of people who were talking about Twitch and live-streaming was unbelievable.
Of the 6 machines which were playable, 5 of the machines were constantly playing FIFA because that is the main reason some people are buying these consoles at launch. FIFA and Call of Duty are what some gamers play religiously and I can think of nothing as boring as watching streams of a game which everyone else is playing. That wouldn’t be the only thing; popular streamers have grown in confidence and established the style in which they present their videos. With the sheer amount of people who will be streaming in the near-future, it will be much harder for gamers who are willing to step up and trying to attract an audience.
With the PS4 and Xbox One being launched recently, we have seen a new side to online streaming which has caused a lot of controversy. The PS4’s Playroom feature has been criticised by many as numerous individuals have been performing sexually explicit acts via Ustream. There has been one in particular which has been well documented via social media and was the most viewed stream at one point. Although both the PS camera and Kinect 2.0 serve their purposes, it is a great shame that something which has been designed with great technology has been used for something as trashy as being willingly nude in front of hundreds of people when the function has been designed for something entirely different.
One of my friends has recently begun streaming his favoured game, Football Manager 2014 and he plays it for hours on end. With the PC gamer being completely different to console gamers, I think that this is the best way to make a name for yourself in terms of streaming if you compare it to console gaming. I’m sure there are many gamers who would have enthusiastically streamed a variety of games if the materials were available to them at a cheaper cost or to their convenience. Now that streaming is easily accessible through the PS4 and Xbox One, it will become too crowded and difficult to make yourself stand out from the crowd. It is even showing signs of being overcrowded with the consoles not even being released for too long.
I managed to get a PS4 at a midnight launch last night (in the UK) and I only used the share function once to see what it was like and I believe many will rather share footage and rare moments via social media than stream to no-one. It is acts like the ones revealed on Ustream this week that brings a bad name to gamers and the culture in its entirety. Many will be put off by it and some parents may even avoid buying their children gaming consoles because of what they read in the papers. I don’t see why we can’t all just play games and enjoy them like they were meant to be enjoyed instead of watching something which you should only be able to watch if you visited a XXX site.
Some of the functions that both Sony and Microsoft have implemented into their new consoles are excellent ways of utilising social media to inform peers of some of your achievements in gaming. I believe this is exactly what gaming required when social media plays such a huge part in sharing special moments in special games. Streaming, on the other hand, has seemed to become overcrowded even in this early stage of the PS4 and Xbox One’s life cycle. Hopefully streaming on consoles for everyone is something which allows genuine ‘stars’ (for a lack of a better term) to be created from showing their skills online.
@SimonMarshall6
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