Games

Thanks; that makes more sense. I still think that the "this really isn't a mod-specific problem" stands, though -- I mean, said streamer could also have had a pornographic desktop background or whatever. It's on that streamer to set up the experience that they want to provide.

This seems rather more like a general problem with streaming configuration on PCs. To the extent that it's mod-specific, I'd think that it'd be mostly that one might want to set up a streaming-specific set of settings and be able to switch to them conveniently en-mass, and one option might be to change mod sets.

I don't stream, but I do recall seeing various issues with streaming come up:

• Users who stream don't like having notifications that have usernames of their real-life friends come up while streaming, because sometimes those people get hassled.

• Ditto for any kind of private messages coming up during streaming. In a normal playing environment, this may be desirable, but if one is streaming to a huge number of people, one doesn't want one's private conversations exposed.

• Similar with other private data, like private documents that might have business or personal information sitting around on the desktop. One might not want to stream that.

• One might not want (or might want!) to use a modded configuration to stream, but it might be better to make that opt-in rather than opt-out.

I think that a better way of dealing with this is for desktop environments to provide first-order support for streaming. Like, provide an easy way to get to a sanitized environment. Maybe the right way to do this is to have multiple user accounts, and just switch to the "streaming" one, but then there is some configuration that one does want to share. That's not ideal, but I think that it's the lowest-effort way using existing functionality to get a sanitized streaming environment. Maybe provide a way to let one user account capture the screen of another user account, and run the game in the guest user account, and be able to switch between the two accounts. That way, all the configuration and whatnot can be in the "main" account, and everything that goes out the stream can be from the "streaming" account, and there's a level of isolation provided. This (mostly) isn't really a use case critical for business PCs and collaboration with shared desktops, which I think is where a lot of the conventions used in streaming came from (though maybe the private message issue is). But it is if you're trying to act like a television crew would in setting up a television broadcast.

I also don't know if Steam Workshop was involved here, but Steam doesn't AFAIK provide a way to switch "sets" of mods across user accounts; that would be desirable, so that the "main" and "streaming" account could have different sets of mods.