I simply don’t believe this. They probably don’t count all the gamers, who get Amazon prime for all the twitch loot. Then you also have people who throw around subs like confetti. Thot streams.
very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.
live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That’s why twitch still don’t have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.
They’re also probably relying on AWS right? I’m assuming the pipeline for serving up prime video would be similar but it’s hard to tell how much that service “makes”. I feel like anything they’re using their own GPUs for is losing quite a bit of money compared to charging their cloud compute customers for it.
If twitch shuts down in a few months I won’t be surprised.
Since they are bought by Amazon I think any service they wasn’t on AWS would have been moved to AWS. Basically, on demand video streaming service (netflix, youtube, etc) does have finer control of how they want to re-encode and have like bit rate throttle on the server/client side so you don’t see too much buffering if internet connection is acting up. This means they can throttle you down to 360p like youtube auto if their data center isn’t fast enough to fetch the high bit rate yet and then feed you the higher quality one once they got it. (or down grade if your connection goes bad) But twitch stream is like I have a 10Mbits stream incoming and I have to copy, run a 2nd pass on the fly for different resolution, duplicate to outgoing servers and send to user all under 46s delay. I am not expert on the backend side and only have some experience dealing with streaming around 20162018. So to me that’s incredible feat but the short timespan means they can’t crunch the output bit rate even if it’s pretty static video. Compare to youtube, if I uploaded a 2030 minutes video in about 12GB on disk, it took them about 35 hours to re-encode, even if the source is already encoded with AV1. (I am not partner so I join the queue like any normal pleb on the internet.)
edit forgot to respond to the cloud GPU thing, I think AWS will be charging Twitch the same way as other company, so AWS aren’t really “losing” money if Twitch choose to use cloud instance with GPU(which would be kinda dumb). They need higher throughput for the data in/out so whatever the CPU ingest part I mentioned above is just to breakdown the stream and feed to user as quick as possible. They are not going to waste anytime to give you better quality stream with lower bandwidth cost. they just feed you whatever fits into their bandwidth budget basically.
The average^^@ user watches Twitch from 4pm to 5.30pm twice a week. There is absolutely a delta between what is required to be a profitable service, what is quality entertainment and what the service is and does currently.
No idea how you can come to any of these conclusions given that viewer numbers are publicly visible. If this were true the streamers wouldn’t be live as much as they are outside these hours.
I’ll be honest, if the solution is Twitch, then I don’t need my problem solved. That is, compared to Twitch, I don’t need an alternative. Not having Twitch is a solid improvement over having Twitch. (kidding of course, but all too often it feels like that with just how bad the technical aspects of their site are)
They pay themselves for infrastructure costs effectively, so it would be the wholesale price. Would love to see their actual accounting book, public data says they made 2.8 billion, would love to see where it went.
I’ve heard (yes anecdotal) that on the books, Twitch pays AWS full retail for server time.
Makes me wonder if that’s done on purpose? Amazon just wants to kill Twitch and rent out IVS (their internal system) to other streaming platforms (like they do for Kick). THAT is outside money coming in.
From the point of view of AWS, they make money whether they host Twitch or some other streamer. If Twitch can’t make money paying retail hosting, the decision of what to do with it has to be made by people who control Twitch.
Because they kinda do it for every service of them, the point is to spread to all the markets with subsidies until kill the competition, and then keep a marginal profit to avoid competition while still makes a marginal profit (what in scale is a big profit anyway). This is usually what these megacorps do.
Do they? I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS even charges Amazon.com full retail for hosting. The point is the company has a lot of different business units that report up to the CEO, and business units generally act like mini companies.
The accounting of charging full retail to other business units is a lot cleaner than giving preferred rates and making it harder to understand the finances of what is going on with the different business units.
A CEO may be willing to operate a business unit at a loss for strategic reasons, but they have to understand that said business unit is costing the company money.
Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.
Both to audience and shareholders. It'll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.
This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.
They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.
Data is surprisingly cheap. It’s more than likely just reinvesting any profits into growth to boost stock price/investment. A lot of companies are hitting the point where growth is leveling off, so they’ve switched to cutting costs
They thought the party was going to last forever, so they ordered a bunch of jumbo pizzas and kegs
I mean it’s more like they paid themselves a bunch of bonuses and hired super duper growth hacking experts or whatever, and now they can’t pay for them, so god forbid they cut from the top
Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.
I mostly watch YouTube streamers. Once in a while they’ll do a Twitch stream and holy shit it’s night and day. 0 ads on YouTube and 30 second and even sometimes 1 minute unskippable ads constantly interrupting the stream on Twitch. I honestly have no idea how people put up with it. I cancelled cable because I didn’t want to watch ads, I’m not going to a site that does the same.
My adblock blocks the ads, but I still get that stupid purple screen. What really annoys me is that it’s a minute and a half long. Twitch really wants me to disable ad block so I look at an ad on a Livestream for almost two fucking minutes.
I minimize and do something else until then but that’s asinine.
hold on, you mean to tell me a platform that exists and is known purely for LIVE streaming content has put ads OVER the livestream interrupting your view? what kind of idiot would have approved such a service killing move?
As a mod, you can postpone an ad by 5 minutes 3 times. You can’t postpone it by 1 minute, you can’t choose to play them during downtime, you can’t do shit but pray an interesting moment doesn’t happen during the 1 minute.
Just when I was hoping to see some fan games start popping up, we’re gonna get Spyro 4: It’s about Slime or whatever. And they’ll probably lock it behind their stupid blizzard launcher and it will be console exclusive before it makes it to pc etc. etc.
I’m done. I loved Spyro, but it’s time to let a dead franchise rest in peace.
I wonder what they could do to breath new fire into it (har). It is a fun trilogy to play, for sure, but it also feels like playing a game of its time.
I really miss games like this though. The last time I felt the bridge between games like Spyro and “modern” times (I’m old) was Kameo. Kameo was such a gem and felt like I was playing a newer Spyro, Medievil, or Banjo game.
While we’re on the subject, where the heck is Conker?
In fact, it’s so close to Sunshine that there’s a FLUDD mod on PC. It performs exactly as you’d expect. It’s obviously cheating and makes platforming much easier than intended, but it’s interesting just how close AHIT actually is to Sunshine in terms of how the game feels to play.
My son is 6 and wants a switch. I know there’s a new switch coming this year or next so I’m hesitant. From a value point of view, sales on steam and the back catalogue prices will be much more enjoyable for him. However, it’s where his friends go. We’re in Australia, so no official support or sales here, so we’ll see when it’s his birthday what the lay of the land is.
Being 6, I would just go with the game system they like. You and I know PC/SteamDeck are killer but youngins always fixate on what they like. Besides, I have a feeling a switch would be cheaper. Not so sure about a switch 2 being cheaper though.
I love how every article mentioning a game/IP owned by Activision has to say that ‘now that Microsoft owns BAK, the game may be an Xbox exclusive. Ragebait journalism at it best.
Interesting read— basically all games boiled down to running at “720p with 50% internal resolution”; that’s 360p internal resolution, less than the GameCube from 2001.
But, that’s paired with Lumen GI, high resolution textures, FSR2 or Epic’s TSR upscaling and a huge shift in how we render games (deferred rendering, temporal effects, normal mapping, etc). And on a Linux handheld. We came full circle in a way, but what a time to be a gamer!
I’m tentatively interested, but I can’t remember the last open world game I played that wasn’t just a reskin of something I’ve already played before. Sure, a game doesn’t have to be innovative to be fun. But it sure helps. Especially in a genre that can feel like doing chores, rather than playing, if it’s not done well.
Try Rodina. Very unique and interesting seamless “open solar system” game made by a single developer. Comes with a fun ship interior builder. It looks very bland and dated on screenshots, but feels awe-inspiring to play, creating a sense of scale that I have not seen anywhere else. It feels almost 3D even on a flat screen.
Rodina does not have a ton of actual content, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Also, you can propel yourself around space with a fire extinguisher, which automatically makes this the best space game in history.
eurogamer.net
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