Facebook shuts down its game streaming app after struggling to challenge Twitch | Hacker News Reader

Facebook shuts down its game streaming app after struggling to challenge Twitch

cnbc.com

23 pointsmrkramer13 comments

One of my favorite streamers signed an exclusivity deal with facebook gaming. It was an awful experience. The interface was confusing (I frequently just had to manually type the url of the page I wanted to go to because there was no way to navigate from the streamer's facebook page to their actual stream, as the stream was happening!). There was no stream notification system (the streamer had a discord where they would announce streams are happening, because otherwise nobody would ever know). All of the comments on streams were with facebook profiles. I don't want to use my real name for that kind of thing.

The entire experience felt incomplete and rushed, and I'm not surprised in the slightest that Facebook is throwing in the towel.

It didn't help that when they did exclusive esport tournaments the streams were not stable and the TV app kept freezing.

I am not sorry this was shut down. I tried to stream content from several dota2 tournaments and I ended up on Youtube, watching non-official streams every time.

It's been interesting to see Facebook do the Google Graveyard thing with also-rans. The difference with Google is that users actually miss some of their axed products. Facebook Gaming was an attempt to challenge not only Twitch, but the glutted cloud gaming segment as well, which based on the OP sounds like they're keeping on the website.

At this point these giants have enough cash to challenge each other at every vertical, building services that don't look like but are basically clones. But I don't know if any of these recent spin-off products have much staying power. Who really likes Facebook Reels or Amazon Luna or Microsoft Mixer or Reddit Talk or Shuffles by Pinterest? (Okay, maybe the last two might be able to capture some niches.)

> Who really likes [...] Microsoft Mixer [...]?

Mixer was great, may it rest in peace. (Mixer in part died so that Facebook Gaming could live. There was a hand-off of streamer exclusivity deals to give Facebook Gaming an early bump when Microsoft decided to graveyard Mixer. More ironic now that Facebook Gaming is dead too.)

It had better game-focused streaming tech than Twitch and easier barrier to entry (and monetization).

For one instance, what Twitch calls "squad streaming" where multiple streamers can share side-by-side streams Twitch requires monetization to be able to use the feature and at least one of the streamers needs to be the "Partner" level of monetization to turn it on, whereas Mixer's equivalent feature was a baseline feature available to all, very easy to turn own (especially if all streamers were already in an Xbox Party together), and had a better viewer experience because it was used more and built to be a common way to view people gaming together. I still miss Mixer sometimes for that feature alone and the ways it was used by some of the groups I was in. It felt much more social in multiplayer games than Twitch's more solo streamer-focused approach.

I am not familiar with this space but it seems like twitch has had a remarkable staying power. After all these years they are still the only name and barely has competition. Wonder what they are doing right and why no one is able to encroach on their turf?

There have been a couple of challengers that failed, now however YouTube is getting very serious about streaming, and they are well on their way to reach parity with twitch. Twitch recently weakened a policy where partners weren't allowed to stream on other platforms - probably because it is feeling the heat from popular streamers moving over to YouTube.

Most streamers already have their live content on twitch and their gods and other video content on YouTube, depending on how the revenue from either side stacks up, they are enticed to switch over.

First mover advantage, plus the competitive fire power of being an arm of Amazon.

Huh, didn't know they even had a Twitch challenger.

They snagged a few mid to larger streamers a year or two ago, then once contracts ended alot of them immediately moved to youtube for a fatter contract at the time or back to twitch for the viewership/community for growth.

> viewership/community

I think that this might have been a larger portion of it. A large amount of the audience for this type of content has either deleted Facebook, or is too young for Facebook. I completely stopped watching T90 (a very entertaining/iconic Age of Empires 2 caster) because he moved to Facebook, and several of my friends did too.

The exact same thing happened to me. I used to be an avid watcher of T90 but once he moved to facebook I almost completely stopped watching him. I described my experience elsewhere in this thread.

It's interesting how anything related to the gaming space is still impenetrable by the usual SV tech giants. Arguably that is also why the market space for gaming is still generally healthy and consumer-focused, rather than some monopolistic monstrosity finding new and creative ways to steal your info.

Twitch is an arm of Amazon, which is maybe "consumer-focused" but hard to argue that it isn't a usual SV tech giant or it isn't a "monopolistic monstrosity finding new and creative ways to steal your info".

Sure, it was an acquisition, but so was YouTube. Since acquisition it has gained near monopoly power over the streaming industry, defeating both Mixer (which was an independent startup, similarly acquired by big tech, and then spun down) and now Facebook Gaming. This doesn't seem healthy for gaming to me to have only one provider left standing for game streaming.

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