Serendipity

"We were at GDC two years ago and we knew of Genital Jousting, and [Free Lives] brought it to our little space at GDC and they were showing it," Lowrie recalled. "Our guy from Steam, our primary contact from Steam, was hanging out with us just for a meeting. We were having a drink afterward, and we saw this on the screen and everyone's in the crowd laughing and playing this game."

Lowrie turned to the Steam representative and asked, "Hey, is there any reason why this couldn't be on Steam? Because everyone's loving it and it'd be great to release. It's a really fun game." His contact didn't see why not, as long as the proper warnings were posted.

His immediate reaction? "Oh, that's a bummer."

Genital Jousting ended up on Steam Early Access in late 2016 and it was an immediate hit with the YouTube live-streaming community. The same couldn't be said for Twitch -- people started tweeting Lowrie, asking if he knew the game was banned from Amazon's streaming site. He checked out Twitch's list of prohibited games and spotted Genital Jousting sandwiched between Dramatical Murder and Grezzo 1 & 2.

His immediate reaction? "Oh, that's a bummer."

"It's disappointing but also understandable because you have to draw some sort of line, I'm sure," Lowrie said. "I certainly inquired about it, but they pointed to the rules, and the rules are rules."

A Twitch representative told Lowrie Genital Jousting had sexual and adult content, and so it got the ax, simple as that.

"It is what it is," Lowrie said. "We're not changing the game. There's no way getting around it. It's a bummer, for sure, because certainly streaming is a huge part of awareness and promoting a game and people enjoying it with their favorite streamers. And it was a bummer because it did have online play, it would've been fun to do. But we were just happy it got on Steam. We were able to sell it and get it out there to a larger audience."

Despite the Twitch blackout, Genital Jousting sold well in Early Access as Free Lives continually updated the game and added new modes. The ban didn't bother Lowrie again until a few weeks ago, in the run-up to the game's complete launch -- fully narrated story mode and all -- on January 18th.

"It did start to bug me again, I guess, because we just want people to have so much fun with this," he said. "I knew that Steam had an internal broadcasting thing for years where you could broadcast your games to your friend group. They could at any time, if they saw you playing, they could peek in and see what you're playing and watch you play."

This was an in-progress Steam feature, still being tested by a handful of beta players. Lowrie had taken advantage of a similar system in May with the big Devolver publisher sale: The studio streamed its games directly to the sale's landing page, allowing folks to see everything in action before buying.

That live stream was supposed to be a one-off thing -- until Lowrie connected the dots. He asked Steam if it would be possible to stream directly to a game page rather than a special sale hub. As luck would have it, engineers were quietly working on this feature. Better yet, it was basically ready for prime time.

"It just happened to be, I don't know, serendipitous -- or coincidental I guess may be a better word -- that I inquired about this ability and at the same time they had been kind of working on it," Lowrie said. "We tested it a couple times and it was awesome because it worked flawlessly. We could dual stream, if we had a different game, we could dual stream to Twitch and to Steam."

Once he realized Steam's live-streaming technology actually worked, Lowrie took the plunge. He asked if Genital Jousting -- a game featuring clothed penises having anal sex with other penises -- could be the first title to host a live stream directly on its Steam page. Steam said yes.

"Frankly, I could not believe it," Lowrie said. "But they were like, 'That sounds great.' They went out of their way. They had a dedicated engineer -- shout to Adil -- and he sat with us. We went back and forth on technical things, and they asked us how it looks on the page, and should we put up some nice borders, and what it should say and how chat should operate."

The first ever livestream to a Steam game page is for Genital Jousting and it's glorious. https://t.co/pn2nUOtPfB pic.twitter.com/RqKZlE9YHC — Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) January 18, 2018

On January 18th, Genital Jousting went live on Steam. Local streamers and Devolver friends played Genital Jousting for six hours, introducing the solo campaign and playing all manner of multiplayer modes. Everything was beamed directly to the game's Steam's page, where viewers could also chat, browse and buy the game.

Over those six hours, the Genital Jousting live stream earned 350,000 unique views, with an average of 4,000 viewers at a time. Compare that with Devolver's Twitch channel, Public Access, which generally receives 50 to 100 concurrent viewers.

"It was awesome," Lowrie said. "It was a cool way to say, OK, we can finally share this and we're gonna share it in a place where people buy it, which is even better. It was fun."

Steam live streams will be commonplace in the near future, as the company opens up this tech to more developers. Devolver itself hosted a stream for the launch of The Red Strings Club, the new game from Gods Will Be Watching studio Deconstructeam, on January 23rd.

"I know other developers started using it," Lowrie said. "They're getting slowly invited out, and then I think eventually it'll be a public deal that all developers and publishers will be able to do."