Its been some time since I started working on RoboStreamer in January. Doing this as a side project next to the day job and family was no easy undertaking - nevertheless I managed to squeeze hundreds of hours out of my personal life to keep working on RoboStreamer ?
And with success: I recently launched the public beta of my RoboStreamer app! But what is this about and why would any game developer care?
I got the idea for RoboStreamer during a Steam event. Lots of games were participating and Steam featured a big box at the top of the event page, showing games which had an active Steam Store Broadcast. The more viewers a game had, the more prominently it was displayed. And that led to more viewers. Games who would stop streaming went away from the display.
That was the reason some game devs recorded a video beforehand and let it running in loop all the time. I thought that was a smart idea and learned quickly that there was no service to automate this. Either you leave your own PC running and use OBS, or rely on some general purpose streaming services which often come with hefty limitations like cut-offs after 2-4 hours of streaming or harsh limits in maximum video file size.
I wanted to help a friend during that steam event who was worried their internet may break down and did not want to dedicate their PC to broadcasting, because development needed to be done. So I did some research and managed to get one of my webservers do the streaming part with some hand-made command line scripts. The thought manifested in my head that with “just some UI” this could be a useful tool for anyone who has a game on Steam. Doing more research on the topic showed that the broadcasting tactic I observed during the Steam event in fact makes a huge difference in whishlists: games who stream have about 50% more wishlists overall! (see my article with more information about that).
So, yeah - half a year later, the public beta is ready. In the end it was not “just some UI” but a LOT of bugfixing and workarounds for bugs and networking issues coming from the Steam ingress servers, but it works stable now.
Since I want to help especially small and/or indie devs, I tried to make the pricing as simple as possible: its $1 for 24 hours of streaming non-stop without limits. No subscription. If you stop your stream, no time is used up.
If you register for the open beta, you get 120 hours of time for free to use at will. No strings attached, no payment information needed. I would be super happy if you'd try out my pet project I poured so much dedication into in the recent months and maybe give me some feedback about it.
Have fun using it and I hope it boosts your game's visibility on Steam to gain more wishlists!
Register now in <1 minute on https://robostreamer.com
Greetings,
Chris
