This year we got the great opportunity to participate again as volunteers on the Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS). As always, great talks and knowledge being shared. Here, we’ll write about what we were able to witness, however, it was far greater than that.

Oculus VR

We got the chance to assist to a VR talk and to experiment with the Oculus VR.  The tech is great, however, motion sickness is very real. So, we’ll need to wait for Oculus to improve (which they’re) in order to be really ready for the mass market. The specifics of this phenomenon, I’ll share it in a future blog post.

Twitch

One session that I would like to expand on, was the one where the panel of Jon Carnage (Twitch), Simon Darveau (Spearhead Games) and Stephanie Harvey (CounterStrike player, among many other things she does), talked about Twitch.

In case you’re not aware of it, Twitch.TV is a website, on which gamers broadcast themselves playing games. Yes that’s –weird-, but it has a massive worldwide audience. Twitch was recently bought by Amazon for almost a billion $ (970 million, to be exact).

So you’ve heard the legends of people having thousands of Twitch followers and that. One thing is to hear about that people, another is to have them in front of you and telling you how they do it and the craziness behind it. Carnage talked about how Twitch in the end hired him as network content director, because of the way he was doing his shows on Twitch (among many other talents he has). Darveau talked about how they used Twicth to improve on the development of their game, they literally put a Twitch feed on the developers office room, so gamers could watch how game was being programmed.

Then, the best was left for last. Harvey talked about how she does to engage, keep with her audience and grew them to the amount of 1.5 million viewers!!!!! Harvey is a former world champion of Counter-Strike, and that’s what she broadcast, something like this:

More importantly was, what she suggested. In order to grow a Twitch following, you must do (at least):

• Be entertaining
• Be good at what you do while broadcasting, whatever it is that you’re doing. So -for example-, if you suck at gaming, but you’re funny, that’s alright. The important thing is finding your uniqueness.
• Have a constant predictable schedule, so your audience knows when to tune in for you.

From our point of view, the whole Twitch phenomenon is a mutation of the Youtube one. Youtube was the one entity on which people subscribed to other people’s channels, so they were up to date on their latest video releases. Well, Twitch takes on that heritage and furthers it up to live content of people gaming.

Wrapping up

Those were the highlights of what we witness, not entering into details of the keynotes of game soundtrack creators geniuses like Marty O’Donnell and Winifred Phillips. Or the great talk about adapting to tough situations by Ollie Sykes.

This was the biggest MIGS edition, with more than 2000 gamers going to it, we hope this keeps on growing, and we keep on going 🙂