Last night, Elon Musk hosted a live stream of himself playing Diablo IV to test X’s live-streaming new feature.
The tech and social media entrepreneur of Space X, Starlink, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk, had a little bit of fun showing off a new feature available on X last night (Sunday, October 1, 2023). The new feature showed off was the live-streaming feature, as Musk demonstrated in multiple videos on X, as he played through Diablo IV on an account called “cyb3rgam3r420.” The X owner made several posts to promote the test was fairly successful, as he continues to push the social media platform into an “everything app.”
The day before the live stream, Musk shared some photos of his setup with a Logitech mouse and super-wide curved monitor as he dungeon-crawled through his latest favourite fantasy RPG. In Walter Isaacson’s latest biographical book on Musk, he wrote about how Musk enjoyed much of his off-work hours playing games or spending time with his friends and children. The biography stated how Musk played Elden Ring until 5:30 AM, right after he decided to buy Twitter.
As he sat in his Razer gaming chair, he only streamed for about an hour and encountered some difficulties in setting up. He spent about ten minutes asking the Neurolink executive Shivon Zilis (whom he had two children with) whether the feed was live. “This is not bad for a little test,” Musk said. “It’s currently way too hard to do this. It took like hours to set this up, so we need to make it just effortless.” While this was just a test, the footage he released did not seem too bad. But based on the comments of its time-consuming setup, it may not be as competitive with Twitch or YouTube quite yet.
He explained how only a user’s subscribers can comment on their live stream. On other streaming platforms like Twitch, users have the ability to choose whether anybody, followers, or just subscribers can comment. Musk said he thinks one of its best features is: “You can talk directly to your subscribers and have a cool kind of discussion among people that subscribe to you, or like you, or whatever.” It sounded more or less similar to Twitch’s format but might be a little stricter yet more focused on nurturing conversations within one’s own community of subscribers.
This was not the first time Musk hinted that X would be gaining a new live-streaming feature. In June of this year, he mentioned that he was thinking about it. He responded immediately when Twitch implemented new rules that affected streamers who made money from branded content. This was around the same time many Twitch streamers transitioned to other platforms like YouTube Gaming and Facebook Live. It will definitely be an interesting battle for Musk versus the other live-streaming giants.
