Steam Broadcasting plans to offer gamers the ability to watch friends play with just the click of a button.
Valve’s Steam is already the premiere digital storefront and social networking tool for PC gamers. The immense popularity of Steam makes it easy to see how this could quickly become a go-to broadcasting tool. The new service launches with features allowing users to invite people straight from your friends list, privacy settings, image quality, text chat and content restrictions.
Streamers decide who can watch their games by having limits like invite only or requests from friends. Valve is focused on giving broadcasters privacy should they desire it. In addition, Steam Broadcasting also gives you the option to set the resolution, ranging from 1080p to 360p, enabling or disabling chat, broadcasting sound through microphones, and even streaming your desktop.Content limits protect younger viewers by restricting pornography, piracy discussion, hacking, threats of violence, racism, and swearing.
No information has been released about whether Steam will allow streamers to monetize their content. Webcam feeds are also, sadly, missing from the initial release. Unfortunately, an archive function is also missing, restricting streamers from saving the footage to upload to YouTube unless they do so via a separate program.
Broadcasts can be watched through either the Steam client itself or the Chrome and Safari browsers. All other browsers are currently unsupported.
As a Beta release, Steam Broadcasting has an adequate range of features, but it’s still far behind the capabilities of competitors like Twitch. Personally, I couldn’t get things up and running. When complete, Steam Broadcasting has the possibility to be a real competitor to Twitch for PC gamers. If you’re interested in giving it a go, just go to Settings > Account and download the Steam Beta Update.
