Crossing the Streams: Promoting Shmups on Twitch TV

[STG4WD]

As anyone who has tried to follow Shmups on Twitch TV knows, they barely register a pulse. Some individuals (myself included) stream some of the time, but it’s hard to know when people will be on, plus there are the obvious time differences between all of our different countries of origin.

I would like to float an idea I have been researching on Twitch:

Not many people seem to know this, but any channel owner can create and distribute stream keys to other people. These stream keys allow the recipient/s to take over broadcasting on that channel from their own PC. The channel owner can also delete stream keys to regulate who has access at any one time.

Now let’s say that a single Twitch channel was created for use by members of this forum. A thread could be created here to allow people to volunteer in 1 hour blocks, and to schedule the slots accordingly. On say a Saturday or Sunday, you could have people broadcasting on that channel in 1 hour slots, starting out East (Europe? India?? Japan???) and moving through timezones for as long as people are prepared to volunteer. What you would then have is a Shmup channel running continuously throughout the day but which only requires individual broadcasters to commit an hour of their time- from their home PC in any country- to make it run.

It would require a bit of admin, but nothing that couldn’t be handled via a thread on this forum. It would also require people not to F-around with the stream keys as logging in with a new stream key will knock off the current broadcaster, but again any offenders could be dealt with via the forum (and never get a stream key again).

What do people think of this idea? It would mean any Shmup fans could follow this one channel on Twitch and be guaranteed action on 1 (or more?!) day of the week.

Should help push up the viewer numbers…

[STG4WD]

PS inb4 Pretas tries to piss on this thread- f*** you buddy!

[ratikal]

There was STGrillz which lists all active STG streams but I'm not sure how much action it gets nowadays. I just now realized you have to put [stg] in the title.

Your idea could work. As of right now, people seem to be polite in not streaming on top of people. However, I think many would prefer to use their own channels instead.

[CloudyMusic]

I sorta feel like that if someone wants to watch STG streams on Twitch, there are already ways to find plenty of them. Following everyone on STGrillz, everyone in our stream directory, and then following any regulars you often see in STG stream chats is a good start. I use a Chrome extension that shows me which Twitch streams that I follow are currently online, and there's usually at least one stream going at almost any hour of the day, sometimes 3-4 during peak hours.

You're right that having a single shared channel might be useful in terms of having a singular place for new viewers to follow in order to see a wide variety of personalities and games during many hours of the day, but I wonder whether the viewership of such a channel would actually be any higher than individual STG streams as they are today. At least with individual streams, each streamer can more easily introduce non-STG players to the genre by streaming non-STG games from time to time. Aquas has introduced STGs to a lot of speedrunners and retro game watchers, KevinDDR has done the same to TGM watchers, I'm sure Owlnonymous has done some of that as well, etc.

It might be interesting to try, I'm not necessarily saying I don't want to see it happen. It's just that I'm just not sure whether it would really result in more viewers than the way things currently are. If nothing else, perhaps some of the bigger community channels (STGWeekly?) could use Host Mode here and there to drive viewers to active streams.

[STG4WD]

People should definitely keep their own streams going, but I think if each of those streamers did an hour per week on the single channel then the whole would be much greater than the sum of its parts. They could promote their own streams during their channel broadcast, and vice-versa.

It would be a lot of fun, especially if people were streaming from many different countries across the time of the whole broadcast. Essentially it would be like a TV or radio channel that people can broadcast shows on from their own home.

Would be cool to broadcast different content e.g. some shows that were streams of rare superplay videos, like if people have digitised VHS tapes or whatever. (Douyu TV has regular broadcasts of things like the KOF Evo finals etc.)

Maybe it wouldn’t get higher viewers, but there’s only one way to find out really. It would definitely get noticed, and I think if done well it would be the kind of thing that Twitch admins like to see.

[STG4WD]

Regarding Host mode I looked into that, but I don’t think it’s as convincing as creating a whole new channel.

Particularly, I think this is a problem:

If I follow channel A (say STG Weekly) and they are hosting channel B when I log in, I’m not sure that channel A shows up as live in my Favourites/Following page.

With a channel that is running for like 6-8 hours solid, it will definitely show up as live anytime anyone logs in.

[Shepardus]

It does show up in the following list on the desktop site, but I'm not sure if it shows up on mobile.

[STG4WD]

It does show up in the following list on the desktop site, but I'm not sure if it shows up on mobile.

Aha, thanks for the knowledge. I'd be very interested to know if it does show up on mobile.

The thing is though, even if you had one user hosting several streams back-to-back, the view counts would still be distributed between those various different streams. It wouldn't be the same as a single channel registering viewers across 6-8 hours of broadcasting.In other words, it does less for the indivuduals streaming than if they band together and make a single 'Hyper Stream'

[Icarus]

There are a number of problems with your suggestions.

1. One hour is nowhere near long enough for someone to get a decent run in, if at all. And some games can go on for much longer than one hour.

2. Unless you make a living playing games like some of the big-name streamers, or have a disproportionate amount of free time on your hands, most players are unlikely to want to schedule a regular block from their short free days to stream. And in some cases - like the past few weeks in my case - people might not want to play STG at all.

3. Even the people who have set up stream schedules rarely follow it.

4. There aren't enough regular streamers across the world to make it happen at present. In your example, you're asking for about 24 streamers to volunteer an hour on a specific day, when you'd be lucky to get about five at present. :3

I'd love to see it happen, but STG is a shrinking genre with a tiny community and an even tinier streamerbase, so the chances of it happening are very low.

[Doctor Butler]

I'm down

[ZaKa-tokyobassist]

I stream shmups as they become available on PS4. I do play Gradius AC quite a bit and occasionally Jamestown Plus. I even did a 1CC run on stream for Gradius AC once.

Unfortunately nobody saw it so now its mostly archived on my Youtube channel.

[STG4WD]

Hey if someone wants 2 hours on stream because They Want To Be The Guy then they just have to ask. I'm not proposing hard and fast rules, just some thoughts. For me, I'd be doing scoring practice on individual stages so an hour would be plenty.

Ultimately I think it's a bit chicken and egg whether the stream scene is crap because the genre is shrinking, or vice versa. There are some very fresh and new games out there like Astebreed and Crimzon Clover, and no shortage of devs making new stuff. The games are all there, but the Shmup genre and its fans don't have their shit together anywhere near even the FGC, let alone the RTS and FPS scenes.

I'm up for doing this in London, and apparently so is Doctor Butler in NYC. If we could get 4 more people from like continental Europe and the USA involved, it would be off to a start...

[trap15]

Echoing Icarus's sentiments.

[Doctor Butler]

What are Twitch's rules in regards to emulation? Is MAME off-limits?

[Shepardus]

I haven't heard of anybody's stream being taken down for MAME. I think you're technically not supposed to stream pirated stuff or other stuff you don't have streaming rights to, but it's not like they care to do much to verify that the roms you use are actually yours.

[Softdrink 117]

3. Even the people who have set up stream schedules rarely follow it.

Guilty as charged.

To be fair though I do try to obey my schedule as much as possible. I usually do go live at around 8PM; it's just that the actual games listing is less than accurate at this point heh. Also school has a way of fucking up near-nightly stream plans, especially during finals week.

As far as the OP's idea -- I think it's interesting conceptually, and I would be interested in helping out with it myself. I agree with Icarus that it would be difficult to coordinate as a recurring thing, and that the timing not only between the different streamers but also of each segment would be difficult to work out in a way that works for all parties involved.

Moreover though, I question the necessity of doing this. As has already been mentioned, between the ability on Twitch to follow specific games (which is great), the Stream Index here, and STGrillz, there are already quite a few ways to find STG on Twitch.

Again, I'd be interested in potentially helping out with something like this because I think it's a cool idea, but I do have some concerns about the practicality of executing it.

[Shepardus]

Yeah I think the main reason for low viewer counts on most shmup streams is just that there aren't all that many people actually looking for shmup streams, especially if the particular shmup isn't a popular one. It would help if it were easier to discover streamers who don't necessarily frequent communities like this forum (I've occasionally seen some people streaming Crimzon Clover whose names I didn't recognize), but I don't see a centralized channel doing much for people who aren't already part of the community. I wish it were possible to follow a whole genre of games on Twitch without having to think of every possible shmup I might want to watch, which I can't be bothered to go through on Twitch.

[ratikal]

You know what would be cool? If there was a ticker on this forum that displayed who is currently streaming. You could even adopt STGrillz filtering system with [stg].