How To: Watch Us Live

Last year we dipped our toes into the loud and brightly colored waters of Twitch streaming. We streamed a charity event, in which we played Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition for eight hours and raised over a thousand dollars for the Edmonton Stollery Children's Hospital. We also streamed our Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition 1.3 update. Now we're starting to stream our office Dungeons & Dragons game that runs on Fridays.

That means you can tune in on Friday afternoons and watch us get paid to have fun!

Twitch.tv

What is Twitch exactly? It's an online site where you can watch people play games live. Most of the channels show video games, but there are a handful of live roleplaying game channels as well. Twitch also broadcasts gaming events, like tournaments, and awards shows. Anything live and gaming-related you'll likely find on Twitch.

Watching a live stream is easy. Plug your headphones or speakers in, find the channel you want on the Twitch website , and start watching. You can follow the Beamdog stream  (the Streamdog!) by clicking the “Follow” heart icon on the right-hand side of the page. Then you'll get an email whenever we go live.

When you watch a live stream, you'll also gain access to a chat window where you can talk to other people watching the stream. It's a great place to chat about Beamdog, the games we make, or the ridiculous situations we've somehow created in our D&D game. The Twitch help page can answer any questions you have.

So Much to Watch

Once you start watching Twitch, you might find it difficult to stop. There are so many great channels with tons of different games streaming all the time.

One of our favorite channels is the official Dungeons & Dragons channel run by Wizards of the Coast. You can watch the Wizards team play D&D live at their offices, including the new Princes of the Apocalypse campaign. 

Fan TinyTurtle has also done a comprehensive series on Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, with the archives available on YouTube.

If you know of any other great streams, post a link in the comments or share with us on Twitter or on our forums. And tune in May 22nd, at 3 pm mountain time, to watch us live on the Streamdog*!

*I've just been informed that if I try to make a cute pun out of “Beamdog” one more time there will be dire repercussions. It's a miracle I got “Beamblog” to catch on. Streamdog may be the last one I can get past the bosses, so it had better catch on.