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Elon Musk streamed Diablo 4 to millions of viewers in a gambit to turn X into a Twitch competitor.
Elon Musk livestreamed Diablo 4 to millions of viewers on X - the social media platform formerly known as Twitter - in yet another attempt to push the service into profitability. This time, Musk seems intent on making X a livestreaming service to rival Twitch itself, and has thus been hosting game streams to test if the website can handle millions of viewers at a time. Spoiler alert: it can’t.
Musk streamed Diablo 4 twice this week - once on an alt account called cyb3rgam3r420 (thanks, PCGamer) and another time on his main account. His first livestream ran about 53 minutes long with a few technical hiccups, but it mostly ran smoothly as Musk hacked-and-slashed his way through a Tier 69 Nightmare Dungeon using a werewolf Druid. Someone did have to come along to help Musk clear up some problems with the stream, but it was mostly stable otherwise.
The second stream on the other hand, did not go nearly as smoothly. Musk hosted the stream on his main account, which has more than 150 million followers, and the wider audience proved more than X could handle. The stream ran for about 40 minutes with only about 25 minutes of actual gameplay, with Musk spending the first 15 minutes trying to pull up comments and sorting out technical difficulties. X, unlike Twitch, does not show live comments during a stream, so he would often stop playing entirely and look at his phone to see what viewers were saying. The stream has 4.8 million views at the time of writing.
The second stream also went through a bevy of technical problems. Musk’s voice was high-pitched, the screen flickered constantly throughout, and the game’s plentiful visual clutter caused by AoE attacks and enemy mobs got hit hard by X’s video compression. The broadcast’s chat room also became full halfway through the stream, barring new viewers from commenting at all.
It’s safe to say that X isn’t going to be taken seriously as a rival to Twitch anytime soon, though Musk himself could have a future in streaming. He’s a little nervous behind the camera, but he isn’t actually terrible at Diablo 4. His Level 100 werewolf Druid build is pretty sensible for the game’s endgame Nightmare Dungeons, and he swept through mobs without much difficulty during the stream.
At the very least, he’d make a better streamer than a social media CEO - though admittedly, the bar is hilariously low at this point.
