Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to create a competitor to Twitch, the leading platform for video game livestreaming. Last week, Musk shared important new details about the plan, along with other updates about his various businesses, in classic Muskian fashion: while livestreaming himself playing a video game.
Using an anonymous alt-account on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter that Musk owns, the billionaire broadcast himself intently playing the online role-playing game “Diablo IV” in a three-hour session on Thursday afternoon. Musk shared his insights on X’s aspirations to rival Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, his plans to share ad revenue with users, and discussed future plans for his satellite internet provider firm Starlink, which is operated by Musk’s SpaceX.
“We’re just starting to add in video ads with a similar thing to YouTube where you can skip ahead after five seconds,” Musk said, referring to X’s livestreaming capabilities. “And we also want to reduce the amount of latency with the streaming.”
The episode offered a revealing look at the world’s richest person in his natural habitat— sipping on what seemed to be a soda, his son seated on his lap, and enthusiastically engaging in his favorite online game with a group of friends—and served as an unregulated ask-me-anything session that would almost certainly never be approved by the in-house lawyers and handlers of any other CEO.
As Musk smashed buttons on his keyboard, he responded to viewer (and his friend’s) questions about Starlink.
“You actually take the any of the Starlink terminals around and have them be mobile, we will have a smaller size terminal around the middle of next year,” Musk said, which was approved by the FCC in September, PCMag reported. “It’s a Starlink mini terminal, you can fit in a backpack.”
“We’ll have a lower cost terminal next year which will decrease the cost of Starlink,” Musk said, which hasn’t been previously reported, albeit it’s not clear whether this is a references to the incoming mini terminal.
Musk also said the company sells Starlink terminals at a loss—however, the VP of Starlink Jonathan Hofeller said in September that this is no longer true, CNBC reported.
Musk leads an expanding array of businesses, including SpaceX, electric car maker Tesla, and AI company X.ai. While X, the social media platform that Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022, is struggling from an advertising boycott (due to Musk’s loosening of moderation rules and some of his own comments on the platform deemed anti-semitic), the billionaire apparently sees livestreaming as a way to attract advertisers and creators to the platform.
“Any advertising that’s in your replies, so if you were to post a stream, any advertising that’s in the replies, you get all the previous… all the advertising revenue. So sometimes that can be quite a lot,” Musk said, describing the revenue sharing that creators could obtain by streaming on X. A friend playing the game with Musk asked if X would add tipping, and Musk responded that X would be “definitely adding tipping,” and X streamers can “choose to have subscribers where it’s a paid subscriber, where you know somebody pays I know, a euro a month or something.”
This revenue-sharing strategy could have significant implications for X. Twitch faced criticism from streamers due to its previous 50/50 revenue split, among other problems, causing some to sign exclusive deals to stream with YouTube. The platform later introduced the “Partner Plus” program in October, making the split to 70/30 for the first $100,000 earned annually, as reported by the Verge. While it’s not clear if full ad revenue sharing would be lucrative for the big stars—one of Twitch’s top streamers xQC said it would cost YouTube $1 billion to get him exclusively according to Gamerant—it could be enough to garner interest from non-exclusive streamers, and give X a much needed new user bump.
What’s more, Meta has its own Twitch competitor called Facebook Gaming, which is willing to pay large sums to secure big-name streamers. For instance, DisguisedToast, a popular streamer, switched from Twitch to Facebook Gaming due to the significant pay gap, Gamerant reported, adding that Twitch offered him only 1/30th of what Facebook and other platforms were willing to pay. While X doesn’t seem to have wads of cash to hand out like Alphabet and Meta, streamers who hear they’ll get 100% ad revenue will have a difficult time staying away.
There’s proof of that streamer attention already. Ninja, the most followed Twitch streamer with 18 million followers, streamed on X in November for an hour and a half.
“You can choose how much, but it’s like, I think one of the perks is like, you can even restrict the chat, or some of the chats, to be just subscribers. So then, you know, the advantage is that somebody subscribing then, they get to chat,” Musk explained. Both tipping (called “donating”) and subscriber only chats are currently key features on Twitch.
X, the platform, currently uses Streamlabs to create these livestreams. Musk mentioned in the livestream, as he tried to configure the chat, that there’s a chat for Streamlabs and a chat for X users.
Musk spent most of the three-hour live stream intently gaming in dungeons as The Druid, “a savage shapeshifter, fluidly transforming between the forms of a towering bear or a vicious werewolf to fight alongside the creatures of the wild,” according to the Diablo IV Wiki.
During his impromptu live-streaming appearance, Musk sported a shirt that said “NPC”—a video game term for a nonplayable character—with the options to “talk” or “skip dialogue.” If you want to match with Musk, you can buy it here. For reasons unclear, Musk had a four-foot-tall candle, which his technician lit for him. Musk awkwardly maneuvered around, rolling it for the ideal mood lighting.
As his son (also named X, and which Musk dubbed “X on X” during the stream) crawled all over him, the billionaire at one point suffered an unlucky sequence in the game, prompting the young X to tell his father “you died.”
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