Profiles are coming!

‍Friends, changes are on the way for the LIV App. 

Soon you will see the watermark re-appear, and you can easily remove it by creating an account with LIV (login via Twitch, Tiktok, Youtube, or email). But you might be wondering, "Why?"

‍1) We need to understand our users better. Who are they? Where do they upload their videos? How many views do those videos get?

Without user accounts, all our data is anonymized and any downstream information, such as view counts, are only available to us through third-party service providers. It’s a problem for LIV as we try to better serve creators and game developers.

Today, if we wanted to get a sense for how many views our creators drove last month we’d work with a company like escharts.com, send them a list of verified creators that we manually track and get a data dump of videos + links that we then have to manually filter for “is this LIV or not?”. It’s costly, time inefficient, and inaccurate.

Our solution today isn’t bulletproof, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s important to us to know usage data. We want to answer questions like:

- who is making the most videos for Game X?
- how many views did LIV creators drive last week?

As our focus is on building tech for Creators, having deeper data on how our work impacts the actual outcomes for Creators is going to be really important for our product development process, and our ability to work with game developers. Which brings us to…

2) We want to share this data with developers.

Today, developers integrate LIV primarily because our community asks them to, or because they implicitly believe in the power of user generated content. That’s not good enough for us, and there’s a ton insights that we *could* provide devs if we had the user data mentioned above. ‍

We want to help devs answer questions like:

- after integrating LIV, how many views are their users getting for our game?
- who are my most active creators?

As you may have seen, we’ve started with paid campaigns with game developers, connecting them to our creators. By knowing more about creators' behaviour, and being able to surface that directly to devs through our dev portal, we think we’ll be able to unlock more paid opportunities for creators.

TLDR: We need to tighten the loop between creators and game developers. For that we need to understand our users better, and share that data with game developers.

Here’s how it’s going to work: the LIV watermark will be forced on by default, and you’ll be able to remove it by creating a LIV account and authenticating with one of the following socials: YouTube, Twitch and TikTok.

If you want to remove the watermark but don’t have one of those accounts, you can send us a message directly through our help desk and tell us what you’ll use LIV for.

As we build more Spaces & StreamerKit related features, we need to store more and more things on our web backend and tie everything (web, PCVR & standalone) together. We’re also planning to roll out in-app monetization features for Creators in 2022, and user profiles are scaffolding for that. 

Speaking of other LIV features, the full changelog for this update is:‍

LIV v2.6.0!‍

New:

- Get your Discord text channel into VR!

Sign in with Discord, add our bot, and pick a channel to watch.

Use `/notify MESSAGE` to send a HUD notification direct to your friend’s eyes 👁🗨

When the bot’s added to a Discord server, any LIV user can watch any of the text channels the bot has access to.

- Discord audio streaming support is now in stable!

Enable it using the toggle switch under Capture. Make sure when you stream to Discord you target the LIV Output window.

- StreamerKit’s getting a bit more love with the return of StreamElements donation notifications, and the addition of SevenTV emote support.

- We've also added a cheeky little Pulsoid integration so you can keep an eye on your own rate with any Pulsoid-supported HRM!

- Our avatars are receiving their first major update in a while - we've updated a few libraries, tweaked their behaviour a bit, and adjusted how "Body Calibration" works. The end result is better lower-body locomotion and less manual tweaking needed. Expect more avatar updates next month!

Fixed:

- Metallic avatars showing too dark were missing a probe in our project that got broken during refactors. We've contacted a trusted UFO supplier and addressed the problem.

- We would crash whenever seeing scary unknown Unicode characters in window titles. Halloween's sadly over, and LIV got over those fears.