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Tech

Plays.tv Wants to Be the Instagram of Video Games

A gameplay sharing service that cuts to the chase.
What a typical Plays.tv post looks like. Image: Raptr

You may not like it, you may not understand it, but there's no denying that videos of people playing video games is one of the biggest things on the internet. PewDiePie, who records himself playing and joking about games, has the most popular YouTube Channel with over 35 million subscribers, and many of the top YouTube channels that follow him are dedicated to gaming as well. So many people are watching other people play games live on Twitch, that the service gets more traffic than Facebook, and was acquired by Amazon for $1 bil​lion last year.

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Raptr, a social-networking website for gamers that's been around since 2007, thinks there's room in the market for another gameplay sharing service, but with a familiar twist.

In the same way that Vine, Twitter, and Instagram hooked users by limiting the type and size of content they could post, Ratpr's "Instagram-like" service, Plays.tv, limits users to 20-minute videos. It captures and compresses gameplay footage from your PC like other software (Nvidia's ShadowPlay, for example), and you can point a camera at yourself and insert that into the footage as well.

You simply press F2 to start capturing, cut the footage down further using Plays.tv's editing tools if you want, post it, and share it through your social media channels of choice. By default, Plays.tv is also set to capture in 20-second increments, and a quick look at the website shows that indeed most shared clips come in well under the 20-minute limit.

"I think the mistake that some people make is that they compare us with Twitch," Ratpr CEO Dennis Fong told me. "That would be not unlike someone comparing Meerkat to Instagram. We're not about livestream content, we're not about live chat, we're not about synchronous play. The people who are sharing on Plays.tv are not entertainers and performers. They're the everyday gamer who's sharing cool moments as they play games."

Ratpr introduced gameplay recording nine month ago and since then users have captured more than four million highlight videos. Unfortunately, Fond said, less than one percent of them were shared. Plays.tv was created specifically to get the videos out there through social media. It makes it easier to share, follow others, and even use hashtags to discover videos (#​fail is good for a laugh).

As someone who spends a lot of time scrubbing through archived Twitch streams, which are regularly three hours long, or YouTube videos in which someone is trying and failing to copy PewDiePie, I see the appeal.

There are so many funny, incredible things that happen in games all the time, and a lot of them are even captured and posted online, but they're hard to find. Usually, it takes something as powerful as the r/ga​ming hive mind to find the good bits. Plays.tv could help people cut to the chase.