The most recent step in Elon Musk’s scheme to transform X—the worsening service you and I nonetheless name Twitter—into “the everything app“? Flip it into Twitch. The flighty billionaire needs the positioning to function as a livestreaming service (in addition to a financial institution, a “global town square,” and presumably a microblogging platform) and within the final couple of days has even helmed a number of recreation streams himself to check the X’s capability to deal with them.
The sport in query is Diablo 4, which Musk has streamed himself enjoying twice over the previous few days, as soon as on an alt account and as soon as on his predominant, which has 158.7 million followers at time of writing.
Musk was really meant to stream Diablo a number of days earlier than. The X proprietor had initially stated he would stream “some silly stuff” like Diablo 4 on September 27, however finally needed to name it off as a result of he was “nonetheless working”.
As a substitute, the primary recreation stream occurred final Sunday on an account named cyb3rgam3r420, and consisted of Musk operating a tier 69 (yup) nightmare dungeon on his stage 100 werewolf druid. Effectively, partially, anyhow. It additionally consisted of about 13 minutes of somebody serving to Musk resolve technical difficulties with the stream and a really excruciating 20-or-so minutes of the richest man on this planet explaining the intricacies of his construct.
Only a fast take a look at of X online game streaming https://t.co/5NCsDczpT4October 2, 2023
Nonetheless, it’s important to admit it labored, kind of. Teething difficulties at first apart, X did not appear to have many points dealing with Musk’s first livestream. That is greater than I can say for the second stream, nevertheless, which went out by way of Musk’s predominant account and lasted 40ish minutes.
For no matter purpose, maybe the truth that Musk’s predominant account has about 1,810,403% extra followers than the cyb3rgam3r420 account, the second stream skilled points all through, continuously flickering and pitching Musk’s voice up by 4kHz, making him sound much more high-pitched than normal, an issue which the person himself reckons will probably be “easy to fix“. Nonetheless, he did finally clear a tier 100 nightmare dungeon, credit score the place it is… due?
However, I feel it is perhaps some time earlier than X streaming is standing atop the corpses of Twitch and YouTube.
Not solely has X/Twitter’s fame been broken by Musk’s weird behaviour, which has seen him have interaction with voices on the far-right of American politics and has not too long ago landed him in authorized scorching water for linking a 22-year-old Jewish man to a neo-Nazi group, however the platform simply would not appear well-suited to the type of livestreaming that Twitch and YouTube can supply. Plus, you’d should name it X streaming, which sounds just like the type of web site you’d solely go to in an incognito window. Excuse me for the daring prediction, however I do not assume X is about to overhaul Twitch any time quickly.