Saying Goodbye to Twitch

As I have discussed in the past, the only reason why I still found myself broadcasting to Twitch even after it became apparent that I would not able to find any real gamer friends with a similar level of passion and interest via such an activity - something I already know is just wishful thinking - was for archiving purposes. Having to monitor the chat every now and then for the occasional interaction reminded me just how lonely my gaming life truly is. I kept finding myself bugging the husband to come join me or watch me but we all know that never works: Shahs of Sunset and the many annoying versions of Desperate Housewives get the priority there. Still, I kept broadcasting only to broadcast some more, with each session chipping off a little more of my humanity and sanity... all for the sake of being active on YouTube where most of my videos came from my Twitch highlights. Well, I have had enough and thanks to GeForce Experience, I have found a convenient way to record my gaming content without all the emotional hassles.

It may lack features but it's intuitive enough.

I have downloaded this program in the past but only to test out its Twitch broadcasting feature. I really couldn't make myself broadcast to Twitch the other day and after encountering some issues recording locally using OBS, I decided to download GeForce Experience again. Then, I proceeded with recording a full match of Heroes of the Storm, which lasted around half an hour and nabbed about 10GB of space on my hard drive. I cringed at first but I have plenty of space so it's not really an issue. But the clarity of 1080p 60fps that I was able to accomplish on my YouTube video compared my previous 720p 60fps upload from Twitch - which now looks rather blurry to me - really made me happy. I couldn't go back to Twitch exports anymore and this of course is great news because I really need to stay away from broadcasting since it hasn't brought me any form of real joy nor satisfaction. Not only is the quality better, but I also noticed performance improvements in my games - some of the frame rate stutters are now gone - and that shadow recording is a neat feature to make it easier for me to mark cool moments during my gaming sessions.

Twitch Export

GeForce Experience Upload

So thank you Nvidia for making my transition away from Twitch easier. As for my console games, well, if I am that interested in recording my sessions playing them, that's what the Elgato Game Capture HD is there for. The software that came with that should be sufficient enough. Now I can't say that my experience broadcasting on Twitch was all bad, I had some fun at times doing it and I had met some interesting people. In the end though, it's definitely not for me, at least not at this moment. It's just too hollow of an experience where you don't make any real, lasting connection with people and with all that back-seating and intentional spoiling going on in the chat, mind you these events are almost impossible to avoid, it can get quite infuriating really fast. The rewards that come with live broadcasting just don't outweigh the bad for me.