SocialGamer Events and News
Hey everyone, welcome to the first of many SocialGamer articles featured on the Starpower Podcast! For introduction’s sake, I’m Devon O’Dell. I do most of the event planning and organization over at SocialGamer, work on the website, manage our projects, and a lot of the other faceless, but necessary work that goes on behind the scenes there. You may also remember me from some previous podcasts, including my role in teaching Elliott to speak Dutch and the first episode of Addicted 2 The Content.
We’re all hoping that these articles will serve to inform you guys about what’s going on in the live stream world of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, including upcoming events, features, and tips & tricks about streaming in general.
So, over at SocialGamer, we’re always trying to set up new and fun events for people to watch. Frequently our events are focused around raising awareness for social issues and raising money to support organizations and foundations attempting to help communities and individuals facing problems, be they health-related, disaster-related or otherwise. Our most prominent events have included two Rock Band Infinite Setlist marathons which drove in over $3,800 combined for charities. Aside from the charitable aspect, these events are always fun to watch.
And we’ve got more coming. This month, we have plenty of events to keep you entertained:
- Azuritereaction will be playing the Rock Band 2 Endless Setlist on drums on Saturday, October 11 starting at 1PM PDT (4PM Eastern). Azuritereaction was the first SocialGamer member to participate in a fundraiser marathon, with his Infinite Setlist (in the style of Starpower staff member Sean’s Drum Hell event) to raise money for a foundation focused around raising awareness for mitral valve prolapse syndrome, a common (usually non-threatening, but inconvenient) heart condition.
- Chidori, Domorin, Sk84life293, and Vixenita are streaming a full-band Rock Band 2 Endless Setlist event. The event starts Friday, October 17th at 3:30PM PDT (6:30PM Eastern) and is geared towards raising money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. All these guys are really good (seriously, if you haven’t heard of them, and you’re into Rock Band, you’ve been living under a rock), and this event should be a boatload of fun to watch.
- Sarcastic Gamer’s Extra Life fundraiser marathon is coming up — on Saturday, October 18th starting at 9AM, going to 9AM Sunday, October 19th, our own member otaku1412 will be participating to help raise money for this event. He’ll be playing Rock Band 2 most of the time, but will also be throwing some cool classic gaming stuff into the mix.
Coming up in December as well is the Infinevent, featuring blindz0r, Carungi, Morkai and Skeltonath. These guys will be teaming up together live to do the first ever 4-person full band Infinite Setlist. (Good luck, guys!)
We’ve also got some good news about upcoming features for the SocialGamer website. The past couple of weeks, we’ve been working on migrating the website over to a new web programming framework. Using this new framework will allow us to easily add new features and content to the site. You’ll be able to connect with friends across multiple gaming communities, set up your own groups and communites, send messages between people, and much more.
Other cool relevant stuff: If you’re a Windows user (sorry everyone else, there will be viable solutions for you soon), Ustream is now letting its users use Flash Media Encoder to connect directly to their streaming servers. Not only does this mean an instant (HUGE) boost in quality for your stream, but you can still use the Ustream broadcaster to add overlays to your stream and record your stream. Stickam and Justin.tv, eat your shorts! If you need help setting this up, refer to Ustream’s instructions and feel free to hop by our support chat if you have any difficulties whatsoever in getting this set up. You will be AMAZED at how much both the audio and video quality of your stream improves.
That’s all for now, folks. I’ll be back sometime around November to let you know about all the new, awesome stuff coming up then!
–Devon
