For a brief period of time today, Valve’s top-secret competitor to the ascendant streaming service for gamers, Twitch.tv, was live and publicly available to users from around the world. According to Gamespot , the entire affair was accidental, a public statement made by Valve laying the claim that Valve.tv’s launch was meant to be an internal test, never intended for public viewing.
“We are working on updating Steam Broadcasting for the Main Event of The International, Dota 2’s annual tournament,” Valve’s statement declared. “What people saw was a test feed that was inadvertently made public.”
It may be too late to put the proverbial genie back into the bottle. However, the early and unexpected debut of Valve.tv giving gamers an inside look into how the streaming service will eventually look and feel. The crux of the communication method contained within Valve’s service takes place over two channels — text chat and voice chat.
Text chat is primarily handled via the recently revealed Steam Chat renovation, beefing up the traditional Steam Chat service with additional features such as inline tweets, videos, and unforgettable favorites lists that will persist even after a pick-up game has ended. Voice chat has also been incorporated into Valve.tv, although it appears to only work inside of Google Chrome as yet, with tests made by Gamespot staff on Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox coming up blank.
Valve unveils its Twitch competitor Steam TV https://t.co/zTvkvcDAZF pic.twitter.com/FQbyCbxcu3
— The Verge (@verge) August 18, 2018
There is no current release date for a public beta or even a public alpha in place for Steam.tv. Valve has already dipped their toe into streaming services in the past, promoting their Steam Link hardware heavily in years past. The Steam Link allows players to play games to televisions in a different room from their PC — or stream other video services such Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube in the same fashion — with a bit of tinkering.
Several competitors threaten the market space already occupied by Twitch and the prospective Valve.tv product, Discord chief among them. Informal chat software that operates outside of the confines of a particular game — or even a game portal like Steam — has been popular since the earliest days of multiplayer gaming. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak were massively popular alternatives to in-game voice chat that afforded players the ability to co-ordinate their efforts in a manner above and beyond that offered up within most game clients, for simple reasons of programming limitations or in terms of game balance.
Steam.tv is no longer accessible to the public, Valve having corrected their alleged mistake and returning the service to internal testing only.
