A couple of months ago Twitch bought Curse, which started off as a communication suite for gamers to use while in game but has since expanded greatly in what that platform provides. Since then the team at Twitch has been working on integrating Curse’s suite of communication tools into its platform, and now it looks like video calling has finally arrived for Twitch. To start, it is now available for desktop users, but mobile support is in the works.
The new feature will have both video calling and screen sharing built right into it, so you can do video calls right in the stream and share whats going on to viewers as well. This isn’t peer-to-peer though, but server-based calls. This is important for a few reasons, some of which are about security, while others are more about performance of the calls themselves.
Interestingly enough, this puts Twitch/Curse in the line of fire with competitors such as Discord and Teamspeak. So it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. The mobile update that will bring these features to the app will be arriving soon, but there’s no specific date announced as of yet.
