We are trying something new for the Summer Sale home page. We are automatically playing a live partner stream. You might be wondering how do you get your games live stream to appear on the Steam Home page?

Here is how it works:

• Setup your stream like normal so that it would appear on your Steam product page. Go here if you need help setting this up.
  
• Once you have 10 concurrent viewers, we will start showing the stream on the relevant Tag Hub Page and Genre Hub pages.
  
• Once you have 100 concurrent viewers, it makes you eligible to appear on the front page. The Steam store will randomly select from all available streams with a 100 or more viewers to take the live streaming spot.

From your feedback (shout out to Joan and Michael), we have rolled out two changes.

1. A ranked streamer white list.
   
   Until recently, you would need to choose a single Steam account to stream onto your product page (done on the steamworks site). You would need to re-publish your app everytime you ever need to change to another Steam user. Making it challenging to schedule multiple streamers.
   
   Now you have add multiple permitted streamers at one time. You can rank them by their priority in case multiple of them are streaming your game at the same time. The rank provide instructions to Steam on which stream to favour and then feature on your product page.
   
   It is important that the streamer enters the appid to complete the association. If they do not have the appid entered or the wrong appid, then the stream would not appear on the product page or surface to the front page (once the viewership minimums are met).
   
   
2. Our second attempt at adding chat moderator support.
   
   Using the new friends interface, you can now promote your friends to help moderate your broadcast chat. The moderators will be able to click on the offending message and choose to either mute the individual for some time or to remove all of their messages from the chat (and from any viewers chat box).

The Steam store broadcast documents have been updated with these changes.

Thoughts?

Hey Folks,

I think this is an interesting article to share with this community. It is talking about the in-store Steam broadcast beta. The article describes the recent experiences that Michael from Rockfish Studios, the developers of Everspace, had using Steam store broadcasting during the summer sale. Tl;dr -> net positive.

Rockfish: Live Steam broadcasting will change the game for indie marketing[www.gamesindustry.biz]

This is a surprising contrasts to earlier article[www.vg247.com] that was published about Rockfish's experience with sponsered live streaming.

I have had a chance to exchange emails with Michael. He super analytical about his approach and thoughts around live streaming and ROI. If you ever catch him, make sure to ask :).

Thoughts?

Hey Folks,

During the summer sale, you may have noticed two visual experiments that Steam was running related to store broadcasts. First, we added to each app capsules a small red live icon when there was an active store page broadcast. We also added widget showing popular broadcasts onto the front page with a screenshot of the actual stream. We believe these are two welcome additions to help highlight your broadcast to steam customers.

We have made these permanent features off the Steam store. Both the live icon and the popular streams widget will appear on the Steam front page, Genre content hubs and Tag content hubs.

We are still trying to figure out what the right signals are for bubbling up a stream to appear in the live widget. For the front page, we are using a concurrent viewer counts of 100 or more. For a content hub, we are a concurrent viewer count of 10 or more. We will of course observe and tweak over the next while.

Thoughts?

Hey Everyone,

We have fixed the RTMP connection issues with two multi-casting platforms. Namely, we were successful testing the patched Steam servers with both Restream.io and StreamShark.io. Thus have deployed the patch across all of our servers.

By uploading the stream to their services, you simultaneously multi-cast to Steam Broadcast and other streaming services like Youtube, Twitch, Facebook and others. There is no restriction by Steam Broadcast on which platforms you can stream simultaneously to. It may increase your marketing reach by broadcasting other platforms.

We are working with Restream.io and StreamShark.io to make it easier to setup a Steam Broadcast. Today you can use Custom RTMP server and pull the settings information from Broadcast/Upload page.

Let us know if there are other multi-casting platforms that we should consider testing.

Thoughts?