Do you need someone to talk to, Twitch?
Queen Elizabeth II is dead. I don't think I've discussed that before, she died a couple of weeks ago I think but I just didn't really have any cause to bring it up, honestly. And why am I bringing it up now? Because I never knew that it was the Queen who was keeping Twitch together with her constant presence. It seems that behind the scenes old Liz was casting her sorcerer abilities over the powers that be at Amazon's only successful gaming foray to try and keep everyone sane, and it worked for the most part. I mean sure, there's been rumblings and grumblings and the odd crazy spark of abject lunacy, but the general health of the platform has remained solid. People have let their masks of sanity slip once at a time, and not too often, so everyone has a chance to heal. After the passing of the old Queen, however; all of that changed. Every single fibre of the great plant that is Twitch has withered into nothingness before the crowd as the powers that be have decided not to play with fire, but swallow in whole in a flagrant act of self immolation.
I think in the great discussion of the game's industry, streaming is a huge part of what makes modern gaming so widespread and accepted as an aspect of society. When it comes to really assessing the cultural impact that a video game has had, the number of Twitch viewers it draws in is a pretty decent litmus test for quantifying the unquantifiable. A certain breed of gamers out there like flocking to streaming sites in order to watch their games be played by a personality they like, I used to enjoy that somewhat myself back when I could stomach spending that sort of time. Thus when a game isn't doing so well on Steam chart numbers, chances are it won't be making streaming numbers either. There are other uses of Twitch too, community building or some such, but I'm really just here for the data analysis, I don't care much one way or the other when it comes to communities of gamers birthing out of the earth.
Of course, we tend to look at Streaming and Twitch as interchangeable, even when alternatives have and will continue to exist. Twitch hold no patent on the concept of streaming, even with all that Amazon money sitting in their piggy bank; which means when questionable choices are made that have a negative effective on every streamer currently working with and any that might arise in the future, the first thing the world does is turn to their competitors to see if they're going to jump on this free opportunity to seize a chunk of the market share. One such competitor is no small beast in their own right, being Youtube.com the second most visited site on the Internet. (Twitch is the 28th) Which is why if Twitch wants to do anything silly, at the very least it needs to keep it's head above whatever Youtube has going on.
Now on an individual creator level these past two weeks have been pretty insane with one moderately known streamer turning out be a gambling addict who had scammed upwards of $300,000 out of fellow streamers and viewers to feed their habit. A sad story there. Oh, and then there was a huge upset with various member of OTK, who I believe to be the biggest cluster of streaming friends although I may be wrong on that, haven been outed for taking part in a cover-up of a sexual assault case conducted by a friend of the group. A disturbing tale. Oh, and the recent Chess Drama with one of the best players in the world being beaten by a middle weight whom he subtly implied cheated someone spilled onto streaming when the two of them hosted a rematch only for the champ to leave after two moves. There has just been a rollercoaster of madness kicking about this particular sector of the Multiverse, what could Twitch possibly do to muscle in and somehow still make themselves the most spit on party in all of this? What they always do, of course; screw up the platform.
The first way Twitch made headlines was through, presumably in response to the gambling addict situation even though I'm fairly certain he wasn't actually gambling on Twitch, banning a vast majority of the gambling streams that were prevalent on the platform. Mostly slots streams but expanding onto gambling services that aren't licenced in the US. A big shake-up to a lot of Streamers and a volatile issue for simply how much money some people have made off streams like that. Heck, even Drake logged onto Twitch one day to do some gambling, and lost a simply obscene amount of money in doing so. Still, stripping away the nuance and 'perspectives' on the story, allows us to see this as a single positive headline that Twitch put up against the armies of negativity that would drown it out after their next correspondence.
And that's because Twitch decided to hit their Streamers where it's going to hurt; their split of revenue. Streamers have two direct methods of receiving payment for their work, one is getting subscription money and donations and the other is ad revenue. Ads make for something of a raw deal, however, given the fact that Twitch hasn't discovered how to set up a 'skip ad' button and forcibly bombards new views with several consecutive adverts whenever they click on a stream. (Really kicking discoverability in the ass as new viewers don't have the patience to sit through that, as I'm sure you've noticed if you've ever gone Twitch channel surfing.) Of course, I'd imagine that Twitch's reticence towards skippings goes quite some way to making Twitch ads more valuable for the platform, but the monkey paw deal makes it one of the most annoying ways to run your Twitch channel. No, for most people it's all about subs.
Which is why it's so galling for Twitch that they offer the worst rates in the list of major Streamer platforms today. 50/50. Outdone by Youtube and Onlyfans. (Yes, even Onlyfans offers a better deal.) Still, there is a special 70/30 cut that Twitch offers to the top of the top, which brings the going rate in line with the rest of the industry. A special deal that for many is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that keeps them burning that midnight oil in the hopes that one day senpai Twitch will notice the- oh, and they just got rid of it. Yep, no more 70/30; now it's 50/50 forever and for everyone. A move that Twitch could only ever justify to itself by arguing that they're the biggest streaming platform and so can get away with offering a worse deal than everyone else because hey, where else are our streamers going to go? Youtube? Their chat functions are trash! Yes, Twitch are using their size to try and strongarm their users into accepting a crappy fund split. That is how you murder a budding good PR buzz!
Of course Twitch has an olive branch; they've upped the share revenue of Ads just in case you actively hate having a growing viewer count and want to chase off potential newcomers. Gee, Twitch, ain't you nice? But these are the steps they have to take because, as they pointed out themselves as a way to try and shift blame, running Twitch with high quality video streaming is just so very expensive. Amazon Web Services have them bent over a barrel with their streaming rates... oh wait... isn't Twitch owned by Amazon? You're telling me that an Amazon owned company, that is one of most visited sites on the Internet, can't knock next door to ask for more favourable rates? Amazon is charging Amazon too much money so the creator's have to foot the bill? No one was ever going to buy figures like that and Twitch are dreaming if they think their sheer size is going to be enough to brag all this hate off.
Big streamers are already talking about their feelings of switching to Youtube, and whilst we're talking about drama addicts here who'll say anything for the limelight; at least some of them have to be serious. Twitch themselves shared how 1% of the top streamers just barely subsidies the entire platform, and if those people start leaving, Twitch is going to become more and more of a chore to run. Smaller streamers aren't going to get that overwash, those viewers will follow their Streamer of choice, and if Youtube makes the bare minimum change to their streaming services, it might as well be a death knell for Twitch. And in business, the one thing you never want to do is place the tools of your own destruction in the hands of a competitor. Because that's stupid. So watch the skies of the industry over 2023, I have a feeling that skyscrapers are about to go tumbling.
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