Twitch

Streamers will be able to drop in on each other with Stream Together, clips are getting a more optimized creation flow, and the platform’s enhanced broadcasting feature will soon be available for all streamers to try, among other things.

Twitch is also making a “Streamer Achievement Program. Streamers will get statues after their channel reaches certain milestones for hours watched.

Per a Rolling Stone report with more details about the ban:

YouTube’s former global head of gaming partnerships at Google, Ryan Wyatt, confirmed to Rolling Stone that Beahm was not offered a contract due to chatter about the circumstances of his Twitch ban. He says that a Twitch employee and journalists investigating the incident told YouTube employees that it involved inappropriate messages to a minor.

Starting this week, Twitch is going to let you add message effects and “gigantify” emotes with Twitch’s Bits currency. The effects promise make chats a little livelier, and I’m excited to see

The TikTok-style discovery feed lets you swipe through livestreams and clips on Twitch’s mobile app. If you land on a livestream you like, you can tap into the stream to start tuning in.

A Twitch help page says it’s ending the feature that lets people watch Amazon Prime Video and chat together on April 2nd, as its usage has “declined over the years” since its 2020 rollout.

The feature lives on for Prime Video subscribers. But if you and your friends want to watch Ricky Stanicky or whatever, the host will need to have an ad-free subscription.

The streaming service shut off access this week, citing “prohibitively expensive” costs. Those costs stem from a tax on high bandwidth services, according to Rest of World:

The [“sender pays”] rule requires companies to compensate the receiving networks for the traffic they send. It’s meant to tax heavy senders like Netflix and YouTube. Livestreaming sites like Twitch face particularly steep fees, as low latency is critical for live content.

Daft Punk (y’know the French electronica duo with the really cool helmets) is streaming their anime movie Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem on their official Twitch channel right now.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s great. If you’ve seen it a million times, watch it again. Or if you really like Daft Punk’s Discovery album and wonder what it would look like as feature length animated movie, then oh boy have I got a treat for you.

In a post on X, Pokimane announced that she’s leaving Twitch — but didn’t specify where or if she will continue streaming elsewhere. Pokimane has become one of the most popular streamers on Twitch with over 9 million followers.

Twitch replied to her post, saying “What an incredible journey it’s been. We’re so proud of everything you’ve accomplished and what’s ahead in the future.”

AGDQ 2024 has just raised $2 million dollars for charity! The charity speedrunning event first broke the $2 million threshold back in 2017 and surpassed that with $3 million just two years later.

So while AGDQ 2024 likely won’t break any donation records, it was still great to witness the milestone live. Hooray!

Twitch is revealing the cities and dates for TwitchCon in 2024, days after huge layoffs for the Amazon-owned company.

TwitchCon Europe will be held in Rotterdam from June 29th-30th, 2024 and will remain at the same location in 2025 and 2026. Tickets for TwitchCon Europe will go on sale in February.

TwitchCon in North America will return to the San Diego Convention Center from September 20th-22nd, 2024, and will remain there until 2028.

In about an hour, Peanut Butter, the shiba inu partner of speedrunner JSR_, will make his Games Done Quick debut running Gyromite — an NES game that made use of Nintendo’s R.O.B accessory. This is the first time a dog has ever speedrun a game at the annual speedrunning charity event and it is sure to go down as one of the best runs of all time. Don’t miss it.

In the wake of news that it’d be laying off 500 employees, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy held a livestream in which he discussed what the layoffs mean for the streaming service long term. In the hour-long stream, Clancy answered questions ranging from if he reduced his own salary to offset costs (no), and if Twitch plans on adjusting its cut of subscriptions to earn more (also no).

But one of the biggest (if obvious) reveals in the livestream is that Twitch simply is not profitable.

The Amazon-owned game streaming platform could lay off around 500 workers as soon as Wednesday, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Twitch laid off dozens of workers as part of Amazon’s company-wide cuts last year, and it recently shut down its service in South Korea due to “prohibitively expensive” costs.

Nvidia, Twitch, and OBS are teaming up on the new enhanced broadcasting feature that will be available in beta later this month. It allows streamers to transmit up to three concurrent streams to Twitch at different resolutions and quality. This allows non-partner / affiliate streamers to broadcast at multiple resolutions and quality levels. Twitch is also experimenting with 4K and AV1 streaming on RTX 40-series GPUs.

You can read more about Twitch’s plans in a blog post and a support page.

Update January 8th, 1:45PM ET: Added additional links from Twitch.

Child safety on Twitch continues to be a problem. Bloomberg reports that Twitch’s “clips” feature is being used to share child sexual abuse material that’s being viewed by users.

While Twitch has handed down stricter rules around sexual content in recent weeks, it seems that the company is more hands-off with clips moderation:

At the moment, Twitch focuses most of its monitoring efforts on its livestreams, which the company says are reviewed using human moderators, artificial intelligence and other tools. By contrast, when it comes to moderating clips, Twitch relies solely on its users to report instances of suspicious or upsetting material.

In the Twitch Recap Game, you play as an autoscrolling dinosaur and try to collect goat emotes while a bunch of clips from the year play in the background. It’s a simplistic game, and the clips are the same no matter how many times you play, but it’s a fun diversion.

The game only available on desktop at the moment, though I imagine it you’ll be able to play it on mobile soon: the game told me to rotate my device when my browser window was too small and had an image of a phone rotating in that message.

Twitch’s “Recap Day” is on Monday, where I’m guessing Twitch will offer personalized recaps of your year.

“Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive,” Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post. While the company tried to find ways to lower costs, “our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries,” he said.

The service will shut down in Korea on February 27th, 2024. Twitch has a few more details in a support document.

The feature just launched in June, but Twitch is removing it “based on community feedback” starting November 15th, according to a support document. However, Twitch partners and affiliates can allow viewers to pin cheers, which are special chat messages purchased with Bits (Twitch’s virtual currency).