Meet Plays.tv, the self-styled Instagram for gamers

It’s not a great time to be a shy gamer.

You can play games alone, of course, but after every feat, you’re encouraged to share your exploits, post them to Facebook, embed them in a tweet, or live-stream them for the world to see. If you aren’t sharing, you aren’t caring.

But lots of gamers — myself included — are a little reticent about flooding their social networks with League of Legends clips. I like to keep my social networks separate; Facebook is for friends and family, and Twitter is for commentary and terrible jokes (and fighting with trolls). Dumping videos to YouTube works fine, but there are billions of others doing the same thing. No one will ever see it.

According to the game optimization gurus at Raptr, this is why we need a site and service like Plays.tv, which the company formally unveiled on Tuesday. The idea is to give PC gamers an easy way to record gameplay video and a new place to share that content.

“Our goal is to be the Instagram for gamers,” Raptr CEO Dennis “Thresh” Fong told me.

That’s a fine target, but just as Instagram has to contend with competitors like Twitter and Facebook, so too does Plays.tv have to sway gamers away from the likes of YouTube and Twitch.

Its plan? Be a little different — and a lot easier.

The software

For one thing, Plays.tv doesn’t do live-streaming. It’s about capturing and uploading particularly notable things that happen during your gaming session.

At the center of Plays.tv is lightweight video-capture technology designed to not interfere with your PC’s performance. This has long been an issue with PC game capture; popular programs like FRAPS tend to wreak havoc on your frame rate, turning your smooth shooter experience into a frustrating slideshow. Fong points out that Play.tv’s capture client results in less than a 3 percent frame-rate loss, so in theory it shouldn’t ruin your killer run.

“We’re talking about a drop from 60 frames per second to 58. No one’s going to notice that loss,” he said.

The client runs in the background, constantly recording anywhere from a few seconds to 20 minutes worth of gameplay while you’re playing (the exact number is customizable). By hotkeying out of your game, you’ll bring up the video editor and can tweak your clip on the spot, trimming its length, adding a caption and hashtags, and uploading away. It’s a bit like taking a screenshot.

Fong likens it to what millions are doing every day on the consoles.

“The PS4 Share button, it’s always rolling,” Fong points out. “That’s essentially what we built into Plays.tv — it’s literally a Share button for any PC game.”

But the real beneficiary of the PS4 Share button hasn’t been gamers — it’s been Twitch. Amazon spent a billion dollars to acquire the popular video game broadcast site last year, and it’s only grown since.

While Twitch functionality is built into consoles, the service requires that you find your own capture software if you want to stream or record games using a PC. The Twitch help section recommends a few — the open-source OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) and XSplit both do the trick — though you’ll still need to connect a few dots to get it all up and running.

Plays.tv, meanwhile, bundles it all into one package.

The site

Once you get your video all trimmed up and ready to go, you press a button and it uploads directly to your Plays.tv account. When it’s finished, the video goes live on your Plays.tv page.

It’s a pretty straightforward site, featuring basic search functions, quickly streaming videos, and the ability to follow other Plays.tv content creators. It’s designed to cut to the chase: If you want to watch game videos but you don’t want to sift through the poorly curated stuff on YouTube, Plays.tv looks to be a viable alternative.

The competition

Gaming video is big business, though, and the waters are getting crowded. Twitch is absolutely killing it, and YouTube is reportedly planning a total relaunch of its live-streaming service to better target gamers and e-sports. The site already enjoys some of the biggest game video personalities in the world, including multimillion-dollar-man PewDiePie and hugely popular master builder SkyDoesMinecraft. How can Plays.tv possibly compete with these huge, established sites?

“I’m a huge fan of Twitch,” Fong admits. “There are 100 million people who watch Twitch. Its analog is television. The people streaming on Twitch are performers. You play a game for three hours, you have to find interesting things to say. But the average gamer is too intimidated to stream. Not everyone wants to be an actor or performer or entertainer.”

“If that’s one end of the spectrum, we’re on the other end,” he continues. “We’re not synchronous, we’re not live chat, we’re not live-streaming. We’re short clips for the everyday person. It’s a place to preserve those great gaming moments but also to relive them with my friends and a community of people who appreciate it.”

That’s a fair goal, but in truth, much of this functionality already exists on Twitch. While Twitch’s live-streaming gets the most press, there are also tons of saved videos to sift through and creators to follow. But Twitch is growing a little hard to navigate and is increasingly cluttered by ads. Finding what you’re looking for on Twitch isn’t as easy as it used to be. Fong hopes Plays.tv fixes that.

“Our goal is not to replace Twitch, and it’s not a YouTube-like platform,” he says. “The way you consume it is very much like Instagram — you find people you want to follow, and they populate your feed. It’s really about people.”

It’s also about money. Raptr has raised $14 million to help get Plays.tv out the door. The company’s bread and butter, a downloadable client that optimizes computers for gaming, is already installed on over 46 million machines and now comes equipped with the Plays.tv experience. That’s a big head start, though, like any social network, it’s all about finding a niche and cultivating a community. Can Plays.tv pull it off? It’s certainly worth watching.

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