Tech & Gaming

Discord will soon offer game streaming, but it’s very different than Twitch – The Verge

Discord will launch a feature called Go Live for its desktop application on August 15th. It will allow anybody with a PC to stream video of their game in any voice channel to up to 10 people at a time.

Go Live is intended to give people the feeling of gaming in a living room with your friends, and it shows. It works based on Discord’s game detection, the same feature that shows your friends what you’re playing when you’re playing it.

The feature will work in any server, although fully boosted servers will have options for higher-quality streams and so will anyone with Nitro. There’s no limit, server-wide, to how many people can go live — and multiple people can even stream in the same voice channel. It’s also a server-level feature, which means that admins can turn the feature off if they’d like. The feature is very low latency; in the demo I saw, the stream was stable and just about real time.

Go Live isn’t taking aim at Twitch, Mixer, or any of the other streaming platforms. There’s no webcam support, for one thing, and it’s limited to 10 viewers because of bandwidth restrictions and latency goals, both of which seem hard to overcome. Mac and Linux computers won’t be supported — Discord’s core users run Windows — but Mac and Linux users can watch from a browser. Discord eventually plans to bring out a mobile version for spectators as well. With the addition of Go Live, Discord appears to be positioning itself as the place for gamers to hang out.

Update, 8/9/2019: This article has been updated to reflect that multiple people can stream in the same voice channel using the service, after Discord corrected their original information.

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