I've been a Twitch user since its first year. I have a select few streamers I watch, and I spend more time on the platform when there are new releases for games I personally like. But, I have been very in-tune with Twitch culture and I know how disorganized it is when it comes to "big" streamers.<p>However, my issue (and also disappointment) with Twitch right now is:<p>- Softcore porn allowed on the platform. Literally, girls doing ass up squats in front of the camera for a $3 donation. You cannot avoid this because its part of the platforms "culture" and even your favorite streamers will one day end up watching a clip or something on their stream. This also breeds incels and very toxic chatters.<p>- Ads. Twitch is fighting against ad-blockers. Fine by me, I can bare ads, but what I cannot do is bear 5 ads in a row every 30 minutes. This has gotten a lot worse lately. It is annoying and disruptive to the user experience, and thankfully there are streamers who disable them altogether as they can sustain themselves through subscriptions and donations from chatters.<p>Is there hope Twitch will fix this? I doubt it. I see them as weak and irresponsible bunch that are only interested in money and don't care about mixing things up in the community.
Honestly, it's not that surprising... from an outsider, Twitch has been incredibly mismanaged in the way that they treat their content creators. And now that Youtube is robust enough to allow streaming (also with the features that streaming has) it's catching up to them.<p>The most curious is the alienation of creators which were raking up like 60k viewers per stream by the threat of banning. If you have ever seen one of these streams, the creators are so limited in what they can do.<p>Another shock was this new Kick platform which is managed by a creator itself, and apparently is doing quite well on the surface (wondering how their balance sheet looks) but I think this is what Twitch needs: a creator at the wheel.
If there was one thing I wish Twitch would change, it’s the entry ads to streams. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve closed the tab while browsing for something to watch because I get an unskipable 30 second ad before I even get to see if there’s something worth watching.<p>For reference, Twitch has invested very heavily in anti adblockers and it’s pretty difficult to sidestep the ads these days without paying $5/month for a subscription.<p>Compare this to streaming on YouTube, which has a (much) worse UI, but tolerates ad blockers and lets you watch the parts of the steam you missed. I’m not optimistic that Twitch will be able to survive if YouTube manages to get their shit together and make a half decent UI.
Am I the only one who takes it at face value that somebody would quit being a CEO because of the birth of their first child? Even if the platform has all the issues folks are saying?
As a former Twitch staff, I wish Emmett luck. Twitch is faced with several challenges right now: increasing competition from all sides, perpetually disgruntled creators, and pressure from their parent company to hit aggressive revenue targets while shilling for Amazon Games. This is all nothing new, and Emmett has been navigating it for years. I'm ready to believe it just doesn't seem as important now as it did a year ago. Having a child will do that.<p>I think Twitch could benefit from a breath of fresh air. I'm a little surprised it's Dan and not someone else from Amazon, but I think that speaks to the fact Emmett went on his own terms on not theirs. Dan knows what he's doing and he'll walk the line between doing what's good for Twitch and doing what's best for creators.
One thing I have noticed with twitch is how stagnant viewership seems to be for most streamers. It seems like once you hit your peak in growth.... there is just nothing after that, no growth at all. Most streamers I watch have been on a slow decline in viewership and subs... Without "oilers" (people who gift a ton of subs or money) most streams would die completely. One main reason for this in my opinion is how terrible ads are on twitch. I watch a lot of GTA RP on twitch... and ads completely destroyed it from a viewer perspective. Steaming in general lends itself well to collaboration... but, when I want to check out a different stream and am met with 2 minutes of the most repetitive and annoying ads.. I quickly go back to my main streamer who I use my twitch prime on so I don't get ads.<p>I got so fed up with twitch ads that I actually use twitch turbo now.. which isn't marketed at all for whatever reason. My viewing experience is so much better now, and I am checking out a larger variety of streamers.<p>Ads on twitch are so horrendous that pretty much every streamer I watch apologize to their viewers about it.<p>Twitch's second failure is that it is so incredibly out of touch with what viewers want to see. Twitch run events are abysmal, yet they give no help or support to the creators who are actually making good events or shows. The fact that twitch didn't become a big player in e-sports is such a massive failure. Look at what happened with Chess... it exploded and is still in a pretty good position all because some smart people decided to run some actually entertaining events. Twitch could of easily dominated the e-sports market by partnering and helping the smaller tournament orgs... yet now those orgs are failing and the e-sports scene is once again cratering to the ground. If it wasn't for the surprise success of Valorant.. e-sports would be dead right now.
What <i>has</i> Twitch actually done new business-wise in the past 5-6 years? Every typical user still uses the same StreamLabs widgets and alerts for years without many new ones, and most of the streaming workflow improvements are upstream in OBS itself.<p>I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow <i>some</i> developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.
I worked for Dan many years ago when he was an engineering director at Google. He's a sharp guy and has a lot of experience in the industry. I hope he does well at his new role.
Twitch's revenue is up 5x from 2015 and 2x from 2019, and generally has been on an uptick since COVID, so I doubt this is anything to do with the companies stability. I think he genuinely was just ready to step down and be with his family/do something else
Feels like twitch, although a massive success by any reasonable standard, has not really lived up to its potential. Weird niche platform really, and it's the internet's goto service for live feeds.
as someone spending fair bit of time watching streams on the site for much longer than Shear's tenure, i had no clue who was running the show. unlike the leadership at youtube, an average viewer had no such visibility of what's happening behind the scenes.<p>and that too, during the most interesting few years twitch has had. people have already listed out the bad parts, but simultaneously the site has broken several (albeit self-set) records.<p>it is crazy how so many people from mainstream media have interacted in the site, yet it is riddled with a lot of fundamental issues.<p>good luck to whomever takes over.
I've been streaming our Linux gaming show on Twitch since the Justin.tv days. Not much has changed from my POV.<p>Granted, I treat Twitch as a CDN that occasionally cuts me a cheque.
FWIW this coincides with a pretty important Amazon-internal announcement about return to office details. That, plus new kid? Yeah, I'd quit my job too.
Twitch CEO be like, we are just a gaming streaming platform. We don't like soft-porn and gambling but WE LOVE their revenue.<p>Sorry, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. You have to make some hard decisions as a CEO.