Twitch Desktop specifically looks to be competing with Steam and Discord. Everybody wants to be the home of gamers, but somehow I doubt Twitch is going to break down Steam's chokehold on playing games (with Steam friends), but am only lightly skeptical that they can't put a dent into Discord's share of 'chat,' especially since Twitch and Discord share so many of the same principles, most notably strong anonymity features.
Don't forget, Twitch bought Curse, a company known for catering to gamers:
- the longtime Curse Client, effectively an addon manager that started for World of Warcraft but now supports games like Rift, Skyrim, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program
- CurseForge, the community site behind addon hosting and development
- the recent "Curse Voice" VOIP and chat client that is a direct competitor to Discord, and which got subsumed with the mod manager into the "Curse App"
- Gamepedia, a wiki host for video game wikis
Together with built-in streaming and just enough social networking, Twitch Desktop combines the best of Curse and Twitch to create a gamer hub that has more value-add than Steam -- largely a storefront -- and is similar to the new Blizzard App (previously known as the Blizzard Launcher or the Battle.net Launcher).
Blizzard's offering streams to Facebook Live, integrates with Facebook login, has a barebones but recently enhanced VOIP chat, and is the competitor with the most direct feature parity -- but captive to a publisher, and outsources all streaming to a third party.
7 months ago when Facebook announced that they're building a gaming hub, I wrote [1] that I'm not opposed to some social-ness in gaming, but real-name-based Facebook isn't the network most people want to conduct their gaming on.
Twitch is a gaming-focused YouTube and pseudonymous social network that can now offer a featureful, streaming, social, and chat application for download, and they're backed by a corporate parent that likes to sell you stuff. This is a pretty good match.
Steam has so much value add beyond just its storefront, which is still the biggest in gaming. The community features are the most important - being able to see who's playing what and more importantly, being able to join their server, is not possible (yet) with Curse/Twitch. A lot of the Curse stuff is honestly little value, and if we're keeping track, implemented in Steam already. Curse Voice = Steam's in-game calls or calls over Steam Message; add-ons/forge = Steam Workshop.
I think that Twitch's streaming capabilities are going to be the question - are they enough of a differentiating factor to break people away from Steam and onto Twitch Desktop?
I probably buy fewer things through Steam than I do Humble Bundle, GoG, etc., but do all my gaming through Steam anyway just for all the other things it provides, even aside from social things like friends-lists and server joining.
To name a few: cloud saves, steam workshop, big picture, and steam controller.
Even if I dropped all the social features in favor of some other platform, I'd still be launching all my games through steam for those features alone.
I don't think I met anyone who didn't use curse begrudgingly.
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If they are seriously aiming to compete only with Blizzard App, then I'd imagine them planning on failing then.
Besides, Steam and Origin also have VOIP and streaming capabilities, And Steam also has mod management systems too, so Curse is closer to steam than to battle.net
Besides, the UI is fairly close to feature parity with discord (much like how curse was) which is adding screen sharing soon http://i.imgur.com/SPPLZhi.png
So it does seem more closer to trying to compete against Steam+Discord than a battle.net
Twitch Desktop is a bloated Piece Of Software that I believe uses Adobe Air. As for competition with Steam - if that's their goal then they're going to fail miserably.
