"Twitch Plays Pokemon" Influences "Twitch Plays Zelda" While the Hype Causes Twitch Chat Issues

"Twitch Plays Pokemon" continues with its successful run, with plans already brewing of the second generation of Pokemon games lined up after the Elite Four for this installment has been beaten.

But the success of the crowd-based and rather literal multiplayer game online, "Twitch Plays Pokemon," has also started the trend of multiple players interacting via chat and basically giving rein to thousands of Twitch users to play one character in the game.

Gamasutra has found a similar game in the form of "Twitch Plays Zelda," created by developer Zack Gerlock, who had tweaked with some codes for "The Legend of Zelda" game.

"The point of this stream was as a personal challenge, as well as an evolution of the Twitch Plays concept," said Mr Gerlock over at "Twitch Plays Zelda." "My goal was to find a game that the concept does not naturally work for, but might still be possible to complete. I knew this would require some outside intervention, at least in the form of cheats, but finding solutions to these problems is part of the fun," he added.

What's really at the heart of this is not the fight between copycats or originality, but rather the fact that Twitch Plays as a concept of online gaming is becoming an addictive one beyond just Pokemon. Admittedly, there may not be as many viewers compared to "Twitch Plays Pokemon." As of this writing, there are only 44 viewers for "Twitch Plays Zelda" compared to the more than 40,000 over at "Twitch Plays Pokemon," and the over 137, 000 views is but a fraction of "Twitch Plays Pokemon's" 31 million views and counting.

But it does suggest that Twitch Plays may become a trend that extends beyond Pokemon and can be successful enough for other games, if there are more developers willing to try.

Twitch Chat Goes Down Due to Massive Viewership and Participation

As expected, activity of this scale does bring with it some problems, some of which have been felt by Twitch users. Those over at Twitch have even resorted to moving the channel from the general chat servers to a dedicated event chat used for large events.

"The unique nature and huge chat participation in the TwitchPlaysPokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system. We're always working on improving the QoS of our chat system, and this has been a wonderful learning experience for us," said the Twitch team over at its official blog.

For now, Twitch has updated users that they already found and fixed a "fundamental issue" with the servers and have also updated networking configurations so that it can adapt to the strain that "Twitch Plays Pokemon" is putting on it.

Twitch, however, does not see "Twitch Plays Pokemon" as anything but a good trend, not only because of the massive use of Twitch but also rather because it puts the service to the test and lets them discover new issues that can be dealt with for improved performance.