The mission of We Playtest Games isn’t just to play or test games, it’s to help every indie game succeed.
Today we’re launching a new major product for our service - game streaming. This allows game studios to pay to have their game live streamed to hundreds or thousands of people through one easy interface.
Having others showcase your game has always been a great way to spread the word about it, but it’s not an easy process. Making connections with streamers one by one is a long and audacious process. So we streamlined it.
We’re currently in the process of signing up streamers, after we have a few hundred of them we’ll make stream purchasing available to game studios.
How it works
Game studios are simply presented with a slider - how many viewers would you like for your game, the more viewers the more it costs.
In the backend a complicated algorithm runs that finds the best combination of streamers for the lowest cost + best rating + most matching tags to stream the game. The price shown is the cost for all these streamers plus a little margin for us.
When ordered all streamers are emailed about the new game, and they can accept or decline. If they accept they have 72 hours to stream the game, if they decline new streamers are found instead to make up the numbers.
How do we know how many viewers each streamer has? We run a worker every minute that monitors every streamer to determine if they’re online and how many viewers they currently have. We then save this and calculate their average total viewers over time. This is how many viewers they should be able to deliver. When a streamer sets their price per stream the algorithm uses these two variables - stream price / average viewers, to get an average price per viewer for each streamer.
Getting Started
If you’re a streamer you can sign up to take part today here. Simply connect your twitch account, fill in the tags of games you like to play, and wait for streams to come to you.
If you’re a games studio you’ll have to wait a little longer until we’ve gathered enough streamers. If you haven’t signed up already though you can sign up here. Once the service is fully available we’ll email you about it and you’ll see a new Streaming button in your dashboard to purchase streams.