The latest step in Elon Musk’s scheme to convert X—the worsening service you and I still call Twitter—into “the everything app“? Turn it into Twitch. The flighty billionaire wants the site to operate as a livestreaming service (as well as a bank, a “global town square,” and presumably a microblogging platform) and in the last couple of days has even helmed a few game streams himself to test the X’s capacity to handle them.
The game in question is Diablo 4, which Musk has streamed himself playing twice over the last few days, once on an alt account and once on his main, which has 158.7 million followers at time of writing.
Musk was actually meant to stream Diablo a few days before. The X owner had originally said he would stream “some silly stuff” like Diablo 4 on September 27, but eventually had to call it off because he was “still working”.
Instead, the first game stream occurred last Sunday on an account named cyb3rgam3r420, and consisted of Musk running a tier 69 (yup) nightmare dungeon on his level 100 werewolf druid. Well, partially, anyhow. It also consisted of about 13 minutes of someone helping Musk resolve technical difficulties with the stream and a truly excruciating 20-or-so minutes of the richest man in the world explaining the intricacies of his build.
Just a quick test of X video game streaming https://t.co/5NCsDczpT4October 2, 2023
Still, you have to admit it worked, more or less. Teething difficulties at the beginning aside, X didn’t seem to have many issues handling Musk’s first livestream. That’s more than I can say for the second stream, however, which went out via Musk’s main account and lasted 40ish minutes.
For whatever reason, perhaps the fact that Musk’s main account has about 1,810,403% more followers than the cyb3rgam3r420 account, the second stream experienced issues throughout, constantly flickering and pitching Musk’s voice up by 4kHz, making him sound a lot more high-pitched than usual, a problem which the man himself reckons will be “easy to fix“. Still, he did eventually clear a tier 100 nightmare dungeon, credit where it’s… due?
Nevertheless, I think it might be a while before X streaming is standing atop the corpses of Twitch and YouTube.
Not only has X/Twitter’s reputation been damaged by Musk’s bizarre behaviour, which has seen him engage with voices on the far-right of American politics and has recently landed him in legal hot water for linking a 22-year-old Jewish man to a neo-Nazi group, but the platform just doesn’t seem well-suited to the kind of livestreaming that Twitch and YouTube can offer. Plus, you’d have to call it X streaming, which sounds like the kind of site you’d only visit in an incognito window. Excuse me for the bold prediction, but I don’t think X is set to overtake Twitch any time soon.