I know a month or so ago I railed at this being a really stupid thing [Blizzard Facebook Streaming]. However, a month or so ago I didn’t know I’d be needing/wanting to do it as a part of my regular duties here! My opinion has for the most part changed. We ran a test of it today using Overwatch, and that was the most important game to use. Some background: Bottom Tier has tried to stream Overwatch using Xsplit [both programs] multiple times and it only resulted in failure because Overwatch doesn’t like FRAPS. That’s definitely a sentence that happened. So when I decided to stream a Blizzard product today, Overwatch was the only one worth using. It’s the only one that has eluded our grasp. The quality isn’t perfect, and there’s some minor slowdown for some people, but overall the sound and gameplay was smooth whether it was on mobile or on a PC.
Now, my immediate thought was “Fuck, I wish I could do this on Twitch!~” and why would Blizzard partner with Twitch? They don’t need to. And we recently found that OBS works pretty great with Overwatch. It’s not a perfect platform for streaming, but the integrated feature allows for their products to be shared with friends and family, and more important [for me; my family doesn’t care about gaming!] is for Facebook pages. So people who run communities can stream to their followers without nearly as much stress. Sure it’s only Blizzard games, but they have a pretty decent amount of variety. They have a shooter, a MOBA, a dungeon crawl, an MMO! And even those have enough content to make it at least a passing fad. I’m not sure that it’s going to take the world by storm or replace Twitch for streaming Blizzard games, but I know it sure as Hell made it easier for me!
Verdict: I was way too hard on it. It’s a fun thing, and it makes my job smoother just in general. I’d like an integrated chat function though. Want to see the stream yourself? Check it out here!