Player.me is looking to combine the community-driven aspects of the Player.me website with creation tools in their new free Desktop Application. Player.me established itself as something of a hub for video game-based content across the internet bringing videos and streams from Twitch, YouTube, Beam, and more all into one place as well as associating all your various social media platforms with a single Player.me persona. Even if we remove their new announcement, Player.me can function as a great landing page for your brand since it pulls your content into one place. While this is all great, the team at Player.me wanted to to jump forward with content creation tools in the form of a Desktop Application.

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The Player.me Desktop Application is built upon three pillars; Discover, Connect, and Create. Discover and Connect will largely be what Player.me is now. Discover comes from finding not only streams and videos but also players and communities with different game pages. Connect is quite literal in this case with built-in connections to all kinds of different platforms and various integrations. Connecting to Twitch and YouTube will link to your channels and pull in videos while connecting to Twitter and Facebook will enable you to cross-post across multiple platforms, streamlining your social media process. The current Player.me experience is built upon these concepts and is available now on Player.me or the beta site that has some new features in the Desktop Application. The real star of the Desktop Application is the Creation features.

Diverging from the social tools offered by Player.me, the desktop client offers a full streaming and content creation suite. A new “Studio” tab opens up an interface to put together scenes with various overlay elements powered by the yet to be released Strexm V2. The editor will allow you to easily put together a professional looking broadcast regardless of your video production knowledge. The studio editor looks like it’s robust enough to have not only a game overlay but intermission scenes as well to be usable for brand-new broadcasters and established content creators alike. Player.me is part of the XSplit family which includes one of the mainstays for streaming with XSplit Broadcaster but Player.me offers a more streamlined, user-friendly approach. XSplit Broadcaster is undoubtedly a powerful tool but it’s also relatively complex which can get in the way if you’re generally a more creative-focused person or just less knowledgeable about encoders and how they work.

Paired with the streaming studio, the Player.me application also includes a couple other small tools to help with content creation. The Express Editor tool looks like the same thing from XSplit which allows you to quickly trim and splice together clips you record. Express Editor wont be replacing Premiere for you if you have a more complicated post-production to your stream, but if you just need to cut of the beginning and end of a video, Express Editor is a fantastic tool for that. Even more complimentary to the studio tool is the in-game overlay for Player.me. While the overlay will allow you to pull feeds from the website and post without leaving your game, the convenient aspect is that the overlay also has stream controls that you’d want readily available like toggling recording, audio, and switching scenes. This might seem like a very basic feature, and it is, but it’s really convenient and oddly not present by default in Player.me’s bigger brother, XSplit.

With the release of the desktop client, Player.me has really solidified themselves as a valuable tool for beginning and growing broadcasters to try and utilize to help them on their road to success. A more established content creator can obviously benefit from more tools but the potential for more exposure, a landing page with all your content, and a free, highly customizable broadcast suite are things that a newer streamer or YouTuber should be taking advantage of. Even if you don’t want to utilize the exact tools that Player.me offers, finding ways to get more connected with an audience and having tools to make your social media presence more consistent are things that you’ll be doing as a broadcaster that Player.me outlines for you. The community aspects of Player.me are available on the website now but if the Create part of the desktop application can live up to the promises, Player.me will have a pretty compelling package on their hands. Moreover, this Player.me announcement is a fantastic marriage of several brands in the XSplit Family. Offering one client that has the social features of Player.me, a broadcast engine powered by XSplit, and an overlay editor powered by Strexm is the kind of thing really enabled by having all these different brands together under one banner.

A closed beta for the Player.me desktop client will be available soon and we’ll give you a full rundown once we have the chance.