What to Know About Twitch
By: Jonatan Campos
The gaming industry has advanced in the last years, and with it, gaming platforms have been developed. YouTube is the most recognized, but Twitch is the one that specializes mostly in video games. Twitch offers gamers the ability to stream their activity and let others watch in real-time. Streams can last anywhere from a minute to eight hours and beyond. A content creator channel can be found by browsing various categories, including specific games. If a specific streamer is found, their channel can be followed to get activity updates and notifications, as Business Insider remarks.
Twitch was born in 2007 as Justin.tv; then in 2011, it became Twitch.tv. According to Stream Scheme, Twitch.tv was purchased by Amazon on Aug. 25, 2014, for $970 million. It is now a subsidiary of Amazon, which already owned two other video game services: Reflexive Entertainment and Double Helix Games. Emmett Shear remained as CEO. In this platform, content creators have the opportunity to make themselves known on the Internet either by playing video games, chatting with the audience or comment on events.
The interaction streamer-audience makes Twitch attractive, and the popularity that it has gained is because of its features. The platform offers a way to earn revenues. Lifewire states that a large number of streamers do make a full-time living (and more) by streaming on the service through a combination of recurring paid subscriptions, micro-donations (i.e., Bits), regular donations (which can range from a few dollars to a few thousand), sponsorships, advertisements and sales.
With paid subscriptions ($5.99), the audience can obtain custom emotes, channel badges and priority in the chatbox to expand the platform's diversity. Bits are a way to reach the streamer as the audience can type anything they would like to appear on the screen.
Besides, starting a career on platforms like Twitch often means spending some time broadcasting to absolutely no one. Discoverability is an issue: when an account holder logs into Twitch, the most visible people are those who already have a large following, according to The Verge.
When a creator has many followers and viewers, they have created a community that interacts in the Twitch platform and is also present in other official social networks to support the streamer. Twitch is improving and developing better numbers increasingly, and Business of Apps states:
The coronavirus pandemic's early days saw an influx of viewers to Twitch, with average concurrent viewers increasing 12% year-on-year in March, the most significant year-on-year increase since Aug. 2019. In absolute figures, that’s 143 million Twitch viewers, compared to 127 million in 2019. It means that lockdown created more interest in Twitch and the growth that it is experiencing lead it to compete with bigger streaming platforms like Youtube.
The support that Twitch and the content creators give each other has led to the rise of a new community on the internet, so it is essential to expect more from them in the years to come along with the appearance of the new generation of video games.