Telltale Batman Multiplayer Definitely Not Meant for Twitch Streaming

One of the biggest announcements around Telltale's upcoming Batman series is that it'll support multiplayer. Not in the traditional sense, but with a mode called Crowd Play that'll essentially let you crowdsource your in-game decisions to people watching you play it. You just send them a URL and they can join in on making choices through phones or computers. However, if you were hoping that this mode would work with livestreaming, you're out of luck: Crowd Play is only intended for crowds in the same place, watching the same screen.

On its blog, Telltale clarified an element of the multiplayer mode that some players had been confused about. The mode technically supports large numbers of players--Telltale says that 2,000 people could interact with the game at the same time. This caused people to speculate that it could work with Twitch streaming.

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However, as Telltale has explained, the latency in streaming would be too high for Crowd Play to be feasible. As the developer stated, "Crowd Play is not a feature intended for use over streaming services. There is latency introduced by services such as Twitch. This means that everyone isn't seeing that game at the exact same time, which means that everyone doesn’t see the choices at the same time. The group can't make a choice together at the same time."

Telltale also said that it would work to make streaming compatible, writing, "We are working closely with all the streaming services to address this problem, but it certainly won't be ideal for streaming out of the box. For now, everyone needs to be in the same room, watching the same screen."

The first episode of Batman: The Telltale Series launches on August 2 for PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, and mobile devices, but Crowd Play won't be available on mobile. Telltale's planning on releasing every episode of the game's first season by the end of the year, but only if it doesn't have to sacrifice on quality. The developer has also said that every one of its games will support Crowd Play in the future.