Twitch Higher-Ups Are Considering Evolving Twitch Into A New, If Not the Next BIG Gaming Platform

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

 

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Twitch Plays Pokemon suggests the service could evolve into a games platform

By Alexa Ray Corriea on Feb 28, 2014 at 11:30a @AlexaRayC

 

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The popularity of social experiments like the Twitch Plays Pokemon group-think play through suggest that broadcasting service Twitch could evolve into its own games platform, according to Twitch vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro.

Speaking with MCV, DiPietro said Twitch Plays Pokemon — which amassed enough participants to disrupt messaging systems across the service last week — hasgarnered enough attention and inspired a number of similar-run spin-offs to prove the platform may be viable for developers to make games for.

"It has delivered a huge and sustained audience for days on end and captivated the attention of the entire Twitch community," DiPietro said. "The incredibly high volume of chat activity has helped us to hone our chat system to deal with massive loads like we're experiencing. It has also made us all think deeply about creative social experiments that can be done on Twitch. This is one of the most interesting things we've seen on Twitch since we launched, and we hope to see more experiments like it."

Twitch Plays Pokemon utilizes commands input by thousands of viewers to control Trainer Red in a streamed version of Pokemon Red. The game hit the 100,000 peak concurrent users mark last week and met two of its major in-game goals just earlier this week: beating all eight gym leaders and reviving the much-celebrated Helix Fossil. Players have also crowdsourced a Google site to monitor progress and discuss Red's next moves.

Since launch two weeks ago, Twitch Plays Pokemon has been viewed almost 30 million times, according to DiPietro. He said this influx of viewers and attention from press could change how game developers view Twitch.

"You never know," DiPietro said. "Twitch Plays Pokémon is an interesting proof-of-concept though. We encourage everyone to think about new ways to leverage Twitch's platform and community for creative gaming endeavors.

"This is unique in the history of Twitch. And when you consider how game developers might capitalize on features and functionality like this, the sky is the limit."

Read our interview with the anonymous programmer behind Twitch Plays Pokemon for details on the project's origin. Polygon also spoke with DiPietro about Twitch's recently-announced plans to launch on Xbox One and the future of streaming on both Microsoft's next-gen console and Sony's PlayStation 4.

 

 

 

http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/28/5456564/twitch-plays-pokemon-suggests-the-service-could-evolve-into-a-games

 

Well now, Twitch could possibly be made its own gaming platform (maybe even a console). SO, my fellow SSMBers, what do you make of this?

[Soniman]

It could be a FEATURE on a already existing console. But a lone console entierley? Good luck with that shit.

[SIXTH-RATE SOMA]

Short-sighted attempt at jumping on the band-wagon. Twitch Plays Pokémon Red is probably the only real success in this regard, and that's nearly over.

[Brad]

Short-sighted attempt at jumping on the band-wagon. Twitch Plays Pokémon Red is probably the only real success in this regard, and that's nearly over.

 

This. The only way they could achieve a similar amount of success is if the the creator of this Twitch announces he'll be doing another game, primarily Pokemon to keep fans around. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

This. The only way they could achieve a similar amount of success is if the the creator of this Twitch announces he'll be doing another game, primarily Pokemon to keep fans around. 

From what I've heard, he is in the works of preparing a chosen Second-Generation Pokemon game and then hacking it so that the Red fight at Mt. Silver features Twitch!Red's pokemon team.

[Old dead account]

The only reason this worked is because pokemon does not require any actual timing in movement and its tile based system. This was really just a fluke, a one-hit wonder, and should be left as such instead of being cashed-in on. If it wasn't for the fact that it was Pokemon, I doubt this would have gained more than a few hundred participants.

 

Also, I personally like gaming alone. Even two people at a time is painful to me much less thousands lol

[VO.SUPER]

Have they seen what happened to the TwitchPlays Mario and Zelda streams? One was just falling into one pit over and over again, and smacking into the same Goomba. Zelda had to take out all damage and item usage in order to work. Pokemon is a fluke. This could only happen with Turn Based RPGs, and even then I'm not sure if they'd be like this.

[Patticus]

I hope that Twitch's leadership ultimately decides making against this move. A flash in the pan success does not a viable gaming platform make. They're on incredibly thin ice with this idea and I'd hate to see that ice break open.

[Sami]

It would be possible to make it work with other games if Twitch can negate that horrendous twenty second lag.

[LATER BUDDY]

Not entirely sure if they understand their situation more than just what's on the surface. This pokemon dealeo is an internet phase/fad thing to begin with and can't see anything else ever being as popular as the Pokemon Red thing, as people have pointed out it's limited to games that can be progressed and beaten one button press at a time, lagzilla being existent, making a custom game for such an idea wouldn't have the nostalgia and familiar factors Pokemon has thus again, not being anywhere near the success of the Twitch Plays Pokemon thing ever.

 

The only way it'd work is fiddling at it, and at that point you're missing the point of why the Pokemon thing is so entertaining. The utter chaos it is yet the underlying backbone that planet earth can still make it through despite all that is what's really fun. There's gambles, the smallest steps can be extremely rewarding, and the fact everyone is in on it makes it fun to enjoy. Once you start tweaking all that such as making limited users to remove lag, not Pokemon or another game/series a large majority know, and even possibly messing with how everyone controls at the same time to try and make it more "fair" or "enjoyable" would through everything out the window why this play through has been successful. Only saying this because if they try to make a console or platform thing out of this, I can't see them straight up copypastaing what the Pokemon thing does; they'd change and/or add/remove things.

 

Totally cool with twitch being like a PS4/One/U service to watch people play and comment and maybe even have games based around that, but building an entire platform on the idea is lawls, I think anyway

[Tornado]

I think it's funny more than anything else that their extremely brief success in making news off of someone else's (incredibly popular already) game is being treated as a good launching point for making their own shit. That's like Twitter forming a movie studio because someone tweeted a publicity photo of Batman petting a puppy and it went viral.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

I think it's funny more than anything else that their extremely brief success in making news off of someone else's (incredibly popular already) game is a good launching point for making their own shit.

Makes me wonder if they plans of hiring the guy behind TPP.

[Salamander]

With that said, I think there are probably games besides Pokemon which might work with the Twitch Plays format... it's just a matter of finding them.  All the experiments I've seen are either other Pokemon games or other classic games which obviously won't work very well within the format.  Nobody appears to have put much real thought into it.