Summary
- Twitter has undergone significant changes in the past year, including job cuts, tweet limitations, and fees for blue verification marks, which have not been well-received by the community.
- Elon Musk has unveiled plans to optimize Twitter for streaming video games, diversifying the platform to compete with Twitch and YouTube.
- Musk tested the streaming capabilities of Twitter by live-streaming Diablo 4 on an alternate account, with the streams accumulating millions of views. It appears Twitter could be aiming to become a mainstream platform for livestreaming, similar to Twitch and YouTube.
Though Twitter has gone through various updates since it launched in 2006, the past year has seen quite a few changes for the social media platform. Since Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and rebranded to X in July, nearly anything seems possible. Of course, not every change has been well-received by the community considering the eliminated jobs, the temporary tweet limitation cap, and the monthly fee for blue verification marks.
Nevertheless, this past week, Elon Musk unveiled his latest plans for Twitter: optimization for streaming video games. This decision may come as a surprise to some since the early days of the site were known more for the ability to share one's thoughts through status updates. However, seeing as the platform has been diversifying itself to compete with several categories of social media, adding Twitch and YouTube to its list of rivals may not be all that unexpected.
Twitter's Streaming Service Could Rival Twitch and YouTube
Although it seems Musk could be preoccupied with a lawsuit from Grimes, it hasn't deterred the billionaire from continuing to pursue new endeavors for Twitter. Interestingly, the full reveal that scaling for livestreaming games on Twitter was in development came via a modest demonstration. For some people, it came as a rather shocking surprise when an account by the name of @cyb3rgam3r420 went live on October 1 with a face cam displaying reactions from Elon Musk.
It's likely Musk initially chose to create an alternate Twitter account, so he wouldn't attract too much attention to the broadcast while it was ongoing. However, the following two stream tests took place on his main Twitter account. Regardless, at the time of writing, the first nearly hour-long Diablo 4 stream has accrued over 714,000 views whereas Test 3 from October 6 has over 9,000,000 views.
While the initial plan was for Musk to speedrun Diablo 4 on September 27, the main purpose was to test where the site's limits were. Musk remarked that he thought the first stream was a success since it was able to handle a lengthy stream and an intensive game at the same time. Furthermore, Twitter engineer Mark Kalman has since revealed that those interested in streaming can connect to Twitter with the open-source streaming software OBS. Naturally, it should be noted that several of these features may not be fully optimized, or are still in beta.
Since Musk touched on comments and building communities in a tweet on October 7, it seems like Twitter is looking seriously into becoming a mainstream platform for livestreaming. Eventually, it looks like Twitter is hoping to build a service that is comparable to the likes of Twitch and YouTube. Currently, broadcasting is only available for Twitter Premium subscribers, but anyone is able to watch during the stream.
Since Twitter's rebrand, it's clear that the app is being altered to become more of an "everything app" than a specialized platform. For example, in addition to gaming streams, there's been experimentation with live shopping in addition to ideas as to how the app can become a financial powerhouse. How exactly the gaming aspect of Twitter will pan out for the platform is still to be seen. Still, Musk's perspective from 2022 that games are Twitter's future doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon.