You’re not the first person to wonder which is better, and you won’t be the last, but hopefully after this post you can walk away with an understanding of the best practices that we’ve come to find in our eight years in this industry. There are two crucial factors to keep in mind when thinking about this issue and both point toward the same conclusion.
Time and Resource Constraints Create Limitations
As a game developer, you aren’t running around with a lot of spare time falling out of your pockets. You have dates to hit, and features to get in and the last thing you want is for marketing or your publisher to show up with priority tasks for you in the last few sprints of your development cycle. If your publisher or marketing department is up to date, they will realize the importance of audience engagement and the "Viewer to Player" journey - they might even know that live-viewer extensions are the best way to get there. What they aren’t aware of is how little time a developer must spare to implement engagement, especially if you want to avoid the oft-tripped-over hurdle of launch problems.
This is where Muxy comes into the picture, and the value proposition of adding engagement to your game through a Twitch extension makes sense.
In lieu of spending a great deal of your development time on adding in live-streamed viewer interactivity Muxy can accelerate that process to incredible speeds. Within a few hours, a skilled developer can add deep and compelling engagement to their games (discussed here). Muxy provides technology not just to quickly build your extension, but also stability that ensures your users have a seamless experience.
So why is that stability so important? Let's elucidate the subtle differences between the way most internet traffic works, and the way Twitch traffic works.
Regular Internet Traffic vs Twitch Traffic: Why that Matters
Most internet traffic looks like the image above. Rolling peaks and valleys defined, largely, by their time of day. Unfortunately for the interactive developer on Twitch, this traffic looks like the image below.
Twitch traffic is extremely unpredictable and unforgiving. When your extension enabled-game breaks out on Twitch, you can go from 500 viewers to 500,000 in a matter of a few short minutes. For the average developer, this is completely unmanageable.
Muxy, however, has spent years in this space. Through countless activations, we have learned how to ride the unpredictable waves of Twitch traffic while maintaining functionality. Muxy’s scaling and infrastructure work has taken place carefully over nearly a decade. Through massive projects, like the Game Awards and Overwatch League, we’ve learned how to handle extreme traffic spikes and deep interactivity. A developer building this entire system themselves will not only have to run up against the limitations of their own deadlines but against the verisimilitudes of Twitch’s audience and the traffic they generate. Muxy provides an answer to this problem.
Instead of wasting your time implementing the entire system from the ground up, Muxy can cut you right to the end of that process where you can focus on what interactivity means to you and your game. As a developer, every second leading up to launch counts, save yourself time while capitalizing on the amazing things that are possible with interactivity by using Muxy.
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