Plays.tv

» see plays.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The internet cafes where I played Counter-Strike around 2003 did not let you install anything, and by 2015, when a client existed that would quietly record every match you played, I had not owned a gaming machine in years. Plays.tv was built for somebody fifteen years younger than me with a tower of their own and a League of Legends account.

Raptr launched it on 31 March 2015. The idea came out of a feature Raptr had added to its own client nine months earlier, which let you capture highlights from a session, and which users had taken to hard enough to produce four million clips before anyone built a destination for them. So Raptr built the destination, raised $14 million led by AMD to pay for it, and Dennis Fong went out and described the result as Instagram for gamers.

The comparison was precise about the shape of the thing. Twitch at the time meant sitting down to watch somebody play live for an hour. Plays.tv inverted that: twenty-second clips scrolled through on a feed well after the match ended, on the implicit claim that any player was a contributor rather than an audience member. The barrier to becoming a creator was pressing one key after something good happened.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the client actually did ~

You installed a Windows program and then forgot about it. It detected when a supported game started and began recording the whole session to disk in the background, continuously, throwing away what you did not ask for. When something happened that you wanted, you hit a hotkey and it saved the preceding twenty seconds as a clip and pushed it to your profile.

Recording retroactively is the entire trick, and it is why the product felt like magic in 2015. Nobody can predict the moment worth keeping. Every capture tool before this one required you to decide to record before the thing happened, which meant either recording everything and sifting hours of footage later, or missing it. Shadowplay had the same retroactive buffer and so did the later console share buttons, but Plays.tv coupled it to a social feed, so the clip had somewhere to land.

~ why it stopped making sense ~

The underlying problem was identical to the one that killed Raptr itself, and the Raptr grave on this site tells that half of the story. Capture stopped being a product and became a feature. Nvidia shipped Shadowplay inside GeForce Experience, AMD put the equivalent in its own driver stack, Windows added a built-in game bar, and consoles grew a dedicated hardware button for it. When the capability arrives with the graphics driver, the reason to download a separate program goes away.

Distribution went the same way. Twitch launched Clips in 2016, which captured highlights inside the platform where the audience already was. Medal arrived doing the Plays.tv idea on a newer stack and with mobile support. Plays.tv had spun out of Raptr in January 2017 to run as an independent company, and the independence bought it nearly three more years before the funding logic ran out.

~ the night it closed ~

The shutdown notice gave users a window to download their own clips, which many of them did not read in time. The servers went down on 15 December 2019 at roughly 23:50 Eastern. Archive Team had been grabbing what it could from the raptr-replay storage bucket the videos had always lived in, and came away with about 112 terabytes, believed to be around half the library and not at every resolution.

Medal then bought the domain from the Plays.tv team and set it to redirect to medal.tv with ref=playstv in the query string, which is still what happens if you type the old address today. Medal also shipped a browser extension to import whatever a user had managed to export, and spent the following months publishing updates on which Plays.tv features it had rebuilt. Of all the ways for a dead product's users to be handled, being inherited on purpose by the competitor is near the top.

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