You asked and we listened. One constant piece of feedback we’ve gotten from our community is to bring back live streaming, and with the wild success of our Patreon, we’re doing just that. The tl;dr of the news is that in the very near future the whole TouchArcade team is going to be streaming exclusively on Mobcrush, a new mobile-focused streaming service. We’re still working out the particulars, but keep your eyes peeled on the site for way more news regarding our streaming plans. We’re going to be aiming for around two hours of streaming a day, and are open to any suggestions on what kind of games you’d like to see streamed and when. I’m a big fan of scheduled shows, so I think we’re going to shoot for a week-long array of content you can look forward to with potential for off-hours bonus streams if anyone is playing something new and cool that they want to share. The URL you’re going to want to bookmark is http://www.mobcrush.com/toucharcade, but they’ve also got a mobile app you can install by tapping this link on your iOS or Android device. From there, search for “TouchArcade" and follow us.
Backing things up a bit, to fully appreciate why we think Mobcrush is going to be so awesome for TouchArcade, we need to take a look at the history of our video content. In the early days, to get video of iPhone games there really was only one way to do it: With a camcorder. It wasn’t a great solution, but it worked, and the quality was alright, particularly once I built a supremely janky light box out of about $25 worth of junk I picked up at the hardware store. As iOS devices eventualy gained the ability to output video, we switched to dedicated capture hardware and started doing the TA Plays series of videos.
TA Plays videos were a hit, but until you’re making videos, it’s hard to fully appreciate the time that goes in to them. Eventually we sort of stopped doing them because the traction they were getting on the site was minuscule compared to us just spending that same time doing normal game reviews, news, and things like that. At some point, Twitch came around, which sort of side-stepped a lot of the time consuming things we were doing with TA Plays as it allowed us to be much faster than we were otherwise in getting video content up on the site since things are streamed in realtime.
The problem with Twitch was twofold: First off, from a technical hardware and software standpoint, streaming on Twitch is complicated. It requires a whole spaghetti pile of cords on your desk between webcams and capture hardware. OBS recently started supporting the Mac, but at the time both OBS and Xsplit required Windows. The fancy looking overlay I rocked above was ridiculously difficult to duplicate on other computers because of how finicky Xsplit is/was. This all compounded to me really being the only one capable of streaming to our channel.
That’d be cool if live streaming stuff wasn’t stupidly demanding when it comes to your time. My typical day involves a stupid amount of multi-asking. (Right now I’ve got six individual Skype chats going, an email avalanche, and two other posts I’m paying attention to aside from writing this one.) When you’re streaming, you can only do one thing: Stream. All that other stuff has to wait, which was having a negative impact on the site as everything came to a standstill while I streamed.
The hope of doing all this always was to grow TouchArcade since Twitch is/was huge at the time, but even that didn’t really work. Looking at past Twitch stats, we’ve had streams peak at around 20,000 concurrent viewers with the front page featuring you can see in the screenshot above, but that wasn’t translating into new members in our community. Instead, we’d have the same 1,000 to 2,000 people who watched everything we do in the world of video, and roughly 18,000 people from Twitch who seemed to actively hate mobile games who at best wanted to know why anyone would bother streaming them, at worst just created a chat moderation headache.
Along comes Mobcrush, which I’m thinking will solve all of the problems we had with Twitch. First off, it’s almost impossible for the streaming setup to get any easier. With Mobcrush, all you have to do is download the Mac app (There’s a PC version coming very soon.), plug in a lightning cable to your reasonably-recent iOS device, and start streaming. If you have any experience with the other streaming software suites, this is seriously just magical in comparison. This means the entire TouchArcade team has (or, more accurately, will soon have, with the Windows app) everything they need to start streaming right now. Some of my guys have even already been streaming, the setup seriously takes seconds to get going. Since everyone is going to be streaming, the time demands on any one particular person (i.e. me) is greatly diminished, so we can have folks streaming while the site is just chugging along as it should.
Better yet, since Mobcrush is mobile only, there’s not going to be any kind of severe mismatch in site demographics and interest base. If you’re browsing Mobcrush, you’re on there because you’re into mobile gaming- Much like if you’re browsing TouchArcade, you’re here because you’re into mobile gaming. Sure, there will always be trolls, but the nice part of being on a remote gaming island like TouchArcade (and Mobcrush) is you’re away from all the people who viciously dislike mobile games for whatever weird reason.
Mobcrush as a company seems really rad too, and fit perfectly in line with the vibe we try to keep here on TouchArcade. They’re just a scrappy startup looking to do awesome things. They’re very much in beta right now, and are hungry for feedback. So, if you’re using the service and think of anything that could make it cooler, better, or similar, you can shoot ’em an email at [email protected] or tweet @Mobcrush. From our side, we’re going to be working really close with them to make sure their platform is as great as it can be which in turn should only further serve to benefit our readers who were asking for us to stream.
I’m working on a few minor hurdles on our side, mainly focusing on the best way to embed the Mobcrush streams here on TouchArcade, but we should be up and running live streaming on Mobcrush this week- Maybe even as early as this afternoon. Either way, you’ll want to keep an eye on our Twitter, as that’s where we’ll be announcing it while we work on getting the front page stuff in order.
UPDATE: Here’s our first stream archive, which will be playable whenever YouTube finishes processing it-
