Eric Johnson

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Put on Your Game Face: Everyplay Adds Face-Recording to Its Mobile Gamecasting Tool Kit

everyplay-facecam-ingameMobile gamecasting tool Everyplay has added the ability to record players’ faces simultaneously with game play.

In plain English, that means you can make a video of yourself playing a mobile game that shows both the game and how you’re reacting to it, in a picture-in-picture window. The feature, known as FaceCam, is aimed at encouraging users to share “let’s play” videos that can add personality and humor to otherwise near-identical game play.

“Let’s play” videos are most strongly identified with PC and console game videos that have been uploaded to YouTube, but Everyplay’s goal is to encourage mobile game discovery by offering socially shareable media that goes beyond what various app stores can show. Developers who elect to download and integrate Everyplay’s SDK into their games have previously had multiple options for how to let players record those videos, including audio commentary.

The new update adds video commentary to those options, as demonstrated in the video embedded below.

In a press release, the company said mobile gamers are now sharing two minutes of game-play video every minute on Everyplay, and that the total of minutes shared has grown more than 25 percent in the past 30 days.

Beyond “let’s play” videos on YouTube, player commentary is also prominently found on Twitch, where game tournaments run like professional sports — color commentators and all — are a common occurrence. Twitch is currently encouraging non-mobile developers to install its own SDK, with a similar focus on the social discovery angle of gaming.

Everyplay competitor Kamcord recently added audio commentary to its own mobile offerings. Kamcord CEO Matt Zitzmann said his company has also considered video commentary, but said that it’s “not a great user experience for the watcher,” because it’s hard to hold one’s phone steady enough that the front-facing camera is consistently on the face.

With FaceCam, Everyplay hopes that (properly filmed) facial reactions will better communicate how mobile gamers feel about a game. Its SDK is currently live in more than 85 games, the most prominent of which is perhaps Rovio’s Bad Piggies, which takes place in the Angry Birds universe.

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