David Oh
Twitch is a live streaming video platform developed and owned by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon, founded on June 6, 2011. As of 2018, it had amassed more than 100 million monthly users, 15 million of those being daily active users. Additionally, it had 2.2 million monthly broadcasters with a total live-streamed gaming content of 24 billion minutes. It's crazy...how did Twitch become so widely-used in that amount of time?
First off, Twitch forces streamers to be real with their viewers. Twitch is a LIVE-streaming platform: no edits, no rehearsals, all authentic. The younger generation, who makes up most of the audience, seems to love streamers who can keep themselves and their content real. Twitch is very authentic and unique in this aspect, causing the streamers to show their authentic reactions to playing various games, which makes it more attractive to these younger viewers. Twitch is ideal for showcasing genuine gameplay. Say that you’re trying to buy a certain game, but you’re unsure of whether the game is actually worth buying. Well, many people will hop onto a stream that is live-streaming that video game to watch authentic gameplay. As Twitch encourages these unfiltered videos, the authentic content encourages viewers to try out the game themselves.
Next, Twitch interacts with its users and fans. Twitch hosts an annual convention called TwitchCon. Many people in the Twitch community want to attend this celebration of Twitch’s famous gamers, who are like celebrities. The event features gaming exhibits, panels, cosplayers, and more. Its exhibit hall contains arcades, board games, tournaments, food trucks, and merchandise. For fans, this is a great experience because they can meet their favorite streamers and also enjoy all sorts of entertainment.
Lastly, Twitch supports real-time interactions between streamers and the viewers. In the live-streams, there are chats where the viewers can communicate with the streamers themselves, or even other viewers in real-time. This interaction heightens the experience that the viewers have as it makes it much easier for them to actually talk to the streamer. This was a concept not widely seen in any other platforms, so it made Twitch more distinguished from its competitors. Conveniently, the streamer can ban any toxic viewers from commenting negative things in the chat.
All of these factors helped Twitch stand out in the midst of various video sharing platforms. The interactive factor caused its popularity to increase greatly. As new, popular games are released, many people hop on Twitch to watch famous streamers play and react to the game. Even famous names such as Drake were featured in some gameplay with famous Twitch streamers. Twitch’s popularity is hard not to acknowledge, and it continues to grow more as time passes.
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