Tag Archives: Twitch

VentureBeat confirms nothing particularly new about Google/Twitch deal.

Details reported in the first wave of reports lead by Variety1 have been confirmed by dude what writes about video game industry business for VentureBeat sub-blog GamesBeat.2

These details are just the typical details that everyone knows about any sort of acquisition news: the price amount is something like a billion dollars, and everyone involved in the deal are going to be thrilled about it. Yada yada yada. Blah blah blah.

The only new detail—and it’s a detail one could probably assume—that Dean Takahashi gives out is the following:

We don’t know everything about this deal, such as when it will be announced and the exact purchase price. We do know that Twitch investors who participated in past rounds are pleased that they will be getting significant returns that are multiple times the amount they originally invested.

Not much of a detail, isn’t it? Yep, it’s not much of a detail at all.

However, there is a curious line in the next paragraph that is worth looking out for:

Google and Twitch declined comment. Both companies happen to be speaking at our GamesBeat 2014 event in September.

So I wonder if we’re not just being strung out and made to wait until the middle of September, when the tech news scene will more than likely be fawning over a certain phone model announcement.3 Hopefully we’ll get some more information soon, because comments like this one posted over at Ars Technica’s write-up of the situation seem to be the biggest fear among Twitch’s vocal user base.4

“You must create a Google+ account to view this stream.”

Fucking shitbags.

  1. Variety: YouTube to Acquire Videogame-Streamifng Service Twitch for $1 Billion: Sources ↩
  2. VentureBeat: Google’s $1B purchase of Twitch confirmed — joins YouTube for new video empire ↩
  3. 9to5Mac: Apple ‘tentatively’ plans mid-September iPhone event as iOS 8 nears completion ↩
  4. Ars Technica: Comment by TurboPower ↩

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E27.

  • First of all, is MSFT trying to sell the fact that in some awful and unreasonable way the Xbox One is backwards compatible? Oh, I need to hear more about these claims.
  • “[…] I think we might have blown our seasonal load too early.” So, this is a thing.
  • I believe the reason that No Man’s Sky will be a success isn’t because of the first-person shooterism or the fact that it’s a four-man game developer entering the same genre arena that Bungie’s attempting to claim next year with Destiny, it’s because of the art direction. Those colors and the way that everything is rendered just screams Mirror’s Edge to me. Even though Faith’s runabout-is-fair-play adventure didn’t sell that well because EA marketed it, any competently created game that includes procedurally generated anything will.
  • Metal Gear Solid V preorders for the Playstation 4 will get a DLC mission where you play as Solid Snake, but Xbox One variants will get a DLC mission where you play as Raiden circa Revenegance? I liked MGR for the challenge it provided, but console-specific exclusives always irks me. I’ve thought twice about buying a Xbox One lately, and if this sort of polarity becomes a trend, it will only add more complexity to making a decision.
  • Good Ol’ Games is one step away from Steam with regards to being trustworthy game distribution methods. DRM-free classics that don’t require a front-end to acquire, and now they’re offering refunds? Perhaps they’re more trusting than Steam is at this point.
  • Oh, it’s just a scam. Morons who brick their Xbox Ones deserve to have voided their warranties and ruined their systems. Backwards compatibility? Odds are your Xbox 360 is setting right beside the Xbox One you just bought AND IT STILL WORKS.
  • 100k user registration spike? 10% of all content on Twitch came from PS4s since launch? Time to start shaming MSFT for not including Twitch streaming in the Xbox One launch software suite.
  • Another adventure game from Telltale that everyone will care about except for me! Yay!

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E25.

  • Oh no. Another Angry Birds spin-off title. Oh no.
  • The second most popular game on Twitch last week was Diablo 2? Standard, since the only folks playing Diablo 3 anywhere near normal as it should be are on now-last-generation consoles. Nice job there, Blizzard.
  • Square Enix iOS title pricing joke aside, Rovio’s incessant push towards monetizing every single aspect of their Angry Birds related games (and every other game they release) is starting to really push me away from ever seriously considering future mobile titles that are priced as ‘free’ in their respective stores. At least with most of Square Enix’s titles, I know what I am paying for ahead of time because they’re simply porting their products they’ve already ported to other less popular platforms, like the Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita.
  • It’s not a huge secret that development on the next title begins after shipping the game that your development house has been working on, and it’s definitely the case in the dynasty that is Gran Turismo. GT6 wasn’t a launch title for the Playstation 4, but that’s being addressed with its release this week. Forza never really held much of a candle to GT’s extreme simulation of everything car-related, but it was a title that Xbox One users picked up at launch. GT6 will certainly see success, but how long will it be until PS4 early adopters head back to their local game store, pull out their wallets and buy a new game? A fair question, I think.
  • Twitch integration has come to Minecraft. I’d have rather that Notch had been working on 0x10c instead, but I understand that subjecting the masses of Minecraft players to Twitch broadcasting while trying to run Minecraft in a stable fashion comes second to revenue generation.
  • Putting cameras in an average person’s living room with a microphone didn’t yield a second thought because of all of the marketing research potential that could be gathered from their players, but they didn’t realize that a camera pointing at a player could mean dicks on the Internet? Clearly, Sony hasn’t thought through the consequences of a player-facing camera as Twitch has decided that it would rather not list the PS4 Playroom as a title on their service, but what is MSFT going to do when this same situation affects them due to horribly, average Xbox One users?
  • Localization mixing as DLC isn’t exactly a new thing, but I suppose that Square Enix getting behind it makes the whole thing newsworthy. I’d buy the pack, but I still have to finish FFXIII, purchase and finish FFXIII-2 and then purchase FFXIII-3 before the optional patch becomes even remotely relevant to me.
  • That answer is easy, Graham: it’s FFVIII. Emo kids run about with swords that are also guns doing wire-fu maneuvers in order to save the world while playing random card mini-games and lamenting about not being in a relationship or something like that. What’s so hard to understand about that? It’s not so simple like the balance of the world has been destroyed and a party fights to correct it, yet I’m fairly sure I’ve got it nailed down in one run-on sentence.
  • GTA: San Andreas is the logical next step for Rockstar’s mobile gaming / porting strategy. Even though the controls aren’t really the greatest, all of their titles play flawlessly on iOS and Android. Can’t wait to not replay GTA:SA.