The Present And Future Of Streaming Is PC At TwitchCon 2022

I lately attended TwitchCon 2022, held on October seventh by October ninth on the San Diego Conference Heart in San Diego, CA. This 12 months’s occasion was a return—the premier Twitch gathering happens in San Diego usually, alternating between it and different places. This additionally occurred to be the primary time since 2020 that TwitchCon was again in-person. Fortunately, it fell on a weekend through which I wasn’t touring throughout Techtober, so I purchased my three-day move and tickets for the TwitchCon official celebration (that includes artist Megan Thee Stallion as a headliner). Right now, I’ll share with you a few of my essential takeaways from the convention.

What’s TwitchCon?

TwitchCon is an annual occasion that brings collectively the Twitch group to have a good time creators and gaming in ways in which could be unimaginable elsewhere as a result of so many of those streamers largely stream from dwelling and particularly go away their dwelling streaming setups to fulfill their followers. I met many individuals, from up-and-coming streamers hoping to make the massive time to superstar streamers who rake in money like no one’s enterprise and have tens of millions of followers. On the primary stage, often known as the ‘Rivals Corridor,’ the largest streamers on this planet performed a number of standard video games towards one another and took part in different occasions like tug of struggle, pong champ, paper airplanes, charades and different bodily video games with followers. Gaming is absolutely the core focus of Twitch and TwitchCon, and there was no scarcity of that however Twitch as a platform has additionally expanded past that. Nonetheless, there have been additionally numerous manufacturers in attendance that clearly have been there to market themselves to Twitch ‘Companions’ (the corporate’s choose dedicated streamers). One of many largest surprises for me was seeing manufacturers like Chevron, State Farm, Capital One, Velveeta, McDonalds, Wendy’s and NYX Skilled make-up on the convention, actually pushing themselves to the group as manufacturers that perceive what Twitch and TwitchCon are all about.

What About PCs?

Many of the world’s main streamers use two PCs to stream their video games—one to play the sport and one other to run the stream. Pairing this with the truth that Twitch isn’t available as an app on consoles (and not using a seize card linked to a PC), it was no shock that PCs have been the dominant platform at TwitchCon. Most small-time streamers, like myself, simply use a single PC to drive every thing by Streamlabs, OBS or NVIDIA Shadowplay feeding into a type of two platforms.

It was abundantly clear at TwitchCon that PC is king. Creators, comparable to Twitch Companions, use PCs to dwell stream, edit and add their content material. Particularly, nearly all of them use desktop PCs to do these duties—I don’t actually recall seeing many, if any, laptops at TwitchCon. The one two consoles I noticed have been on the ViewSonic sales space—a PS5 and a Swap working Smash Bros.

There have been all types of PC element corporations and system builders current on the present. PC Builder PowerGPU was there, as have been RGB Customized PC, iBuypower, Starforge and Lenovo Legion. So far as element/accent corporations went, Western Digital, Gigabyte Aorus, Razer, Logitech G and Logitech for Creators, Thrustmaster, Audio-Technica, Shure, Hyte and HyperX have been all in attendance.

The HyperX sales space was particularly fascinating. The corporate showcased its new place as a part of the HP household by leveraging HP’s 3D printing capabilities to print customized keycaps for various skilled sports activities league groups. I assumed the cross-promotion of the groups’ respective logos with the HyperX model was a very fascinating technique to showcase its capabilities.

Nonetheless, the one PC firm that basically amazed me with its presence at TwitchCon was Intel. Intel was actually all over the place at TwitchCon. If model consciousness was the secret at TwitchCon, so far as most attendees have been involved, NVIDIA and AMD have been virtually nonexistent. That mentioned, most of the programs did nonetheless have Intel 13^th Gen CPUs paired with NVIDIA GPUs, so there was not less than some presence for them there. Along with the NVIDIA programs, Intel additionally showcased many Arc-based programs at TwitchCon. Intel additionally had the Intel Gaming truck that includes Intel NUC PCs with Arc graphics playing cards that the corporate had setup exterior at the back of the conference middle.

Earlier than TwitchCon, Intel additionally arrange an off-site celebration which promoted the brand new 13^th Gen CPUs and the brand new Arc GPUs. A lot of Intel’s closest system builders have been additionally in attendance, displaying off their newest programs. Within the leadup to TwitchCon, Intel additionally had 4 simultaneous livestreams of various Twitch streamers constructing PCs—it was fairly the operation to look at. I acquired a possibility to talk with Intel’s Marcus Kennedy, GM Gaming Division at Intel and acquired a tour of the entire Intel Creator Problem and TwitchCon Social gathering. There have been simply 100+ PCs on the off-site occasion alone. Intel and its companions additionally had all types of giveaways and promotions occurring. For instance, individuals may have their PCs upgraded with assist from the likes of Thermaltake’s Mike Fierheller or ASUS’ Juan Jose Guerrero (also called JJ). It was very cool to see individuals getting their PCs upgraded on the Intel pre-TwitchCon occasion and it was additionally nice to see all of the sorts of programs individuals introduced in to get upgraded.

Intel additionally showcased an idea through which it positioned an Intel NUC PC inside a full desktop PC to create a singular, extra compact system for smoother streaming. Whereas this was solely an idea, Intel mentioned some system builders like Origin PC and CLX might be able to construct such programs quickly if streamers need the choice. I additionally noticed a number of of these programs on the Intel sales space on the TwitchCon present flooring, the place they acquired an overwhelmingly constructive reception. Intel additionally co-sponsored the Lenovo Legion sales space, aptly named the “pit of demise” after a number of individuals acquired harm combating on platforms over a foam pit, which made nationwide information.

Again at TwitchCon’s essential flooring along with AT&T Fiber, Intel additionally co-sponsored the PC gaming LAN, offering a high-quality, low-latency gaming expertise for the TwitchCon. I used to be really impressed with the sheer quantity of PCs that I noticed on the occasion, and, amongst these, the sheer share that have been Intel-based (largely that includes the 13^th Gen processors). On prime of all that, Intel additionally co-sponsored extra sales space house and Corsair shared that very same house with Activision which included a small 6 v 6 multiplayer LAN of the brand new Name of Obligation Trendy Warfare II launching this month.

Wrapping up…

General, I imagine TwitchCon is an important expertise for anybody concerned within the streaming world. Whereas I didn’t attend any of the events sponsored by a few of the larger streamers on the platform, it was nice to fulfill up with lots of my mates from again in my PC gaming days. TwitchCon really felt like a reunion of the various totally different PC element distributors and PC builders, the likes of which I might extra doubtless anticipate to see at a present like CES or Computex. It was refreshing to see a extra creator-focused PC expertise and listen to so many individuals discuss constructing and configuring their PCs for gaming and streaming. AMD and Nvidia’s absence from the present was conspicuous and stunning—a missed alternative for each corporations to succeed in out to the creators they declare to be concentrating on with their merchandise. I actually suppose that Intel’s attendance and efforts to boost model consciousness within the Twitch group can pay dividends for the chipmaker.

Moor Insights & Technique, like all analysis and tech business analyst corporations, gives or has supplied paid companies to know-how corporations. These companies embody analysis, evaluation, advising, consulting, benchmarking, acquisition matchmaking, and talking sponsorships. The corporate has had or at the moment has paid enterprise relationships with 8×8, Accenture, A10 Networks, Superior Micro Gadgets, Amazon, Amazon Internet Providers, Ambient Scientific, Anuta Networks, Utilized Mind Analysis, Utilized Micro, Apstra, Arm, Aruba Networks (now HPE), Atom Computing, AT&T, Aura, Automation Wherever, AWS, A-10 Methods, Bitfusion, Blaize, Field, Broadcom, , C3.AI, Calix, Campfire, Cisco Techniques, Clear Software program, Cloudera, Clumio, Cognitive Techniques, CompuCom, Cradlepoint, CyberArk, Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Applied sciences, Diablo Applied sciences, Dialogue Group, Digital Optics, Dreamium Labs, D-Wave, Echelon, Ericsson, Excessive Networks, Five9, Flex, Foundries.io, Foxconn, Body (now VMware), Fujitsu, Gen Z Consortium, Glue Networks, GlobalFoundries, Revolve (now Google), Google Cloud, Graphcore, Groq, Hiregenics, Hotwire International, HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Honeywell, Huawei Applied sciences, IBM, Infinidat, Infosys, Inseego, IonQ, IonVR, Inseego, Infosys, Infiot, Intel, Interdigital, Jabil Circuit, Keysight, Konica Minolta, Lattice Semiconductor, Lenovo, Linux Basis, Lightbits Labs, LogicMonitor, Luminar, MapBox, Marvell Expertise, Mavenir, Marseille Inc, Mayfair Fairness, Meraki (Cisco), Merck KGaA, Mesophere, Micron Expertise, Microsoft, MiTEL, Mojo Networks, MongoDB, Nationwide Devices, Neat, NetApp, Nightwatch, NOKIA (Alcatel-Lucent), Nortek, Novumind, NVIDIA, Nutanix, Nuvia (now Qualcomm), onsemi, ONUG, OpenStack Basis, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, Panasas, Peraso, Pexip, Pixelworks, Plume Design, PlusAI, Poly (previously Plantronics), Portworx, Pure Storage, Qualcomm, Quantinuum, Rackspace, Rambus, Rayvolt E-Bikes, Crimson Hat, Renesas, Residio, Samsung Electronics, Samsung Semi, SAP, SAS, Scale Computing, Schneider Electrical, SiFive, Silver Peak (now Aruba-HPE), SkyWorks, SONY Optical Storage, Splunk, Springpath (now Cisco), Spirent, Splunk, Dash (now T-Cell), Stratus Applied sciences, Symantec, Synaptics, Syniverse, Synopsys, Tanium, Telesign,TE Connectivity, TensTorrent, Tobii Expertise, Teradata,T-Cell, Treasure Information, Twitter, Unity Applied sciences, UiPath, Verizon Communications, VAST Information, Ventana Micro Techniques, Vidyo, VMware, Wave Computing, Wellsmith, Xilinx, Zayo, Zebra, Zededa, Zendesk, Zoho, Zoom, and Zscaler.

Moor Insights & Technique founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst Patrick Moorhead is an investor in dMY Expertise Group Inc. VI, Dreamium Labs, Groq, Luminar Applied sciences, MemryX, and Movandi.