Valve Launches Steam.TV, a Twitch Competitor

Yestarday PC gaming giant Valve had registered a new domain name: Steam.tv. Steam.tv went live and here is a look :

The Steam.tv website was only showing off The International, which is the giant Dota 2 tournament I was referring to earlier -- so it wasn't exactly allowing any ol' Steam gamer to livestream their gameplay sessions quite yet. The interface was vastly advanced compared to Steam's existing Steam Broadcasting website. It feels far more like a native web app. 

Once I logged in, one can access a new Steam Chat friends list and group chats -- the interface seems very similar to steamcommunity.com/chat, but with more functionality -- and invite friends to watch videos together while we chat. The interface has room for quite a few tabs up top for additional chat windows, but weirdly the video gets minimized when you invite friends. You have to expand it again.

Oh, and there's built-in voice chat right there in your web browser, at least in Google Chrome. While the Steam.tv interface works in Firefox and Microsoft Edge, voice chat isn't supported in those browsers yet.

A Valve representative told CNET that Steam.tv went live by accident, and was meant to be an internal test as of today: "We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2's annual tournament. What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public," said the company. 

So far, Steam.tv looks like it could be a neat place to hang out with friends while watching games, but it's not clear from that statement if it'll be an alternative to Amazon's Twitch, Microsoft's Mixer and Google's YouTube Gaming.quite yet.  Still Valve states that Steam.tv went live by accident.

Filed to : Steam