I'm not sure where else to ask this, it's a pretty esoteric question, but it is game related.

I was wondering if someone has any ideas or knowledge on how to detect if someone is live-streaming the game. It need not be foolproof. My first strategy would be to query the system process list and see if there are any well known streaming applications running, and I figure that would work well enough for my purposes. But maybe there's a better way? Like a graphics state you can query to see if it's being recorded, or maybe looking at active network connections (unlikely since it would almost certainly need admin/root rights).

This is not, incidentally, some kind of hare-brained anti-piracy scheme. I would never do that; I owe the popularity of my game to various people live-streaming and making videos of it. I want to detect live-streaming for quite the opposite reason: to improve the experience for people watching the live-stream.

Thanks.

If so then don't bother detecting it; just provide a known shortcut that live-streamers can toggle to enable livestream features. Less hassle, more predictable :)

Yeah this seems like a much better approach. Simply provide a UI option to enable live-streaming features.

Some games such as Jackbox Party Pack have designed their game to account for the possibility that someone might be streaming it by displaying an audience room code at the bottom so viewers can join in, but if you're not live-streaming then it doesn't impact the gaming experience whatsoever. This is what you need to achieve.

So maybe a balance between always on live-streaming features and optional rich live-streaming features is something you might want to consider.

If so then don't bother detecting it; just provide a known shortcut that live-streamers can toggle to enable livestream features. Less hassle, more predictable :)

Fair enough, and I'd agree with you 99% of the time that that's the appropriate way. The particular user-experience-improvement features I'm thinking of won't work if the user has to explicitly enable them, though. (That's probably hard to believe; all I can say is my game is not a typical game and what I'm thinking of is very, very meta.)

I'll keep the objections raised here in mind. I've been watching some streams and I have few ideas on how to divine whether someone is live-streaming behaviorally. If it proves to be something I can't figure out how to do inoffensively enough, I just won't put the feature in.