In a short span of time Twitch has witnessed exponential growth. It now caters to more than 45 million unique viewers from different platforms every month. More than a million people are using the service to broadcast gameplay from a variety of gaming platforms. Twitch happens to be the fourth largest bandwidth user in the U.S. after Netflix, Google and Apple, towering over Facebook in fourth place. It has plans to extend its reach even further and now looks towards handheld consoles like the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS.
In an interview with Games Industry Twitch CEO Kevin Lin said that despite the fact that there are hardware limitations on handheld consoles the company “definitely” wants to bring its service to these consoles. Only recently it made its first move into mobile with an in-game integration with Asphalt 8 from Gameloft.
Since server/GPU concerns on handhelds might not make them the best devices for broadcasting gameplay sessions they can keep up with online streaming. Which is why Lin says that Twitch wants to build “viewing apps” for consoles like the PS Vita and 3DS since they’re less CPU intensive than broadcasting.
Perhaps somewhere down the line it would be possible to even broadcast gameplay sessions from handheld consoles. But providing users the ability to steam them online on these consoles is certainly a great step in this direction.
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