When news broke this week that a man used PlayStation 4’s live streaming capability to expose his sleeping wife’s naked body to the world using the free PS4 software, The Playroom, a little piece of me died. This man took what is supposed to be a fun, innocent feature of the PS4 and made it something worse. He turned it into a problem, and it may affect all of us.
Changing the Meaning of “Playroom”
So far I’ve had quite a bit of fun streaming my PS4 gameplay for all the world (or at least five or six people) to see. I’ve streamed Killzone, Resogun, and Need for Speed. I’ve had interaction with the chatroom and shared some fun experiences with friends and strangers. It’s so incredibly simple to do, that it makes the PS4 that much more of an attractive purchase.
But now that people are finding ways to abuse it, Twitch has pulled the ability to stream anything from The Playroom, and I’m worried we won’t have that luxury at all for much longer.
“We removed Playroom content from the directory because a majority of it was non-gaming related,” the representative said. “We will look into adding it back as PS4 owners become more familiar with the games-only focus of Twitch content. In the meantime, you can view all of the amazing gameplay from PS4 broadcasters in this directory page on Twitch.”
Sure, Twitch and streaming have been around for a while, but there were always hoops to jump through. You had to have some software on your computer to capture the video. You had to get the settings just right in order to get the video and audio captured correctly. You had to connect it to your Twitch account and get it broadcast over your social networks.
It wasn’t exactly as easy as clicking a button, like it is on PS4. You had to be committed to the process, and I guess either people didn’t care enough about streaming their sex acts to go through all those steps, or no one ever thought about it.
Sharing Your Stupid Mistakes With the World
But it appears this infamous PS4 streamer has let Twitch and Sony know that making (and sharing) poor decisions is far too easy. To Twitch’s credit, they have said they will be shutting down accounts that are not about gaming, but there’s no way of stopping these kinds of things happening while in-process, unless they just happen to get lucky.
The worst part is that it may affect all of us, either by making streaming from your PS4 more of a hassle, or by increasing the delay, or by making you upgrade your account to discourage the low-life’s from doing something like this again.
It’s a shame that one of the PS4’s biggest selling points has been abused and now may threaten the functionality of that very feature. Hopefully a solution can be found that keeps streaming to Twitch easy and fun, but limits the ability to abuse it.
Because, come on, I have a massive audience just dying to see me cause some more wrecks in Need for Speed…
