It is said that you never bathe twice in the same river, and it is equally unlikely to find two people alike strolling through the TwitchCon halls: the middle ground between a big gathering, a celebration of everything related to streaming and an event in which to show the public the products to broadcast live, took place in Amsterdam and was highly anticipated, also given the two-year break imposed by the pandemic.
Inside it could be found a broad cross-section of the so-called Twitch Generationa colorful cauldron of people who for a couple of days shared the same spaces to take a picture with their favorites, buy gadgets or watch a sort of Games Without Borders halfway between online and offline called Twitch Rivals, in which they participated also Italian streamers like Pow3r and Kurolily (here our interview with her).
Streaming
Free Guy, the video game movie that brings together 40 years as a nerd
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TwitchCon is an atypical fair: there were no bombastic announcements that characterized the June videogame now archived, but between the lines you can read many things about a service that is rapidly becoming a new contender for the attention of millions of peoplecompeting with traditional media, with Netflix and all other pastimes.
The first impact you have is that of an incredibly varied audience in which dozens of different identities blend peacefully. Competitive gamers and boys in cosplay, LGBTQ + communities and lovers of Minecraftfan del retrogaming and fans of art, music, roleplaying, drag, miniature painting, TV series and every other shade of pop culture. In the collapse of the mainstream, walking through the halls and corridors one gets the impression of being in front of intersecting ensembles, passions that find their space and their representation in the personal schedules of each one: “Twitch is for everyone, because people may have different interests but they are all inclined to be part of a community, or multiple communitiesand this is exactly our goal and the key to our success – explained Doug Scott, head of marketing at Twitch – People gravitate to those who stream to find other people with common interests ”.
And this TwitchCon could only be a celebration of these communities, as the two-year pandemic blew Twitch as a service: millions of people have started streaming and even more have begun to watch them, supporting their favorites with donations and subscriptions in an almost entirely direct economy between those who produce and those who consume, in which of course Twitch (and therefore Amazon) acts as an intermediary and holds a slice.
According to the latest data, the company has distributed around a billion dollars to streamers: in 2021, 15 million people started streaming and 2.5 million watch it daily, with most audiences ranging between 16 and 34.
But it’s not all plain sailing, beyond the colorful TwitchCon audience, the service has seen a lot of criticism in recent years for its ability to respond to and adapt to attacks on LGBT + communities and in general anyone who was bullied online, but the countermeasures seem to have arrived: “Sometimes it is difficult to communicate what we do because there are so many small steps towards a result, but it is a job that never ends. Now we use machine learning to understand if an account is fake and report it to streamers, we have introduced account verification to be able to write in chats, chats reserved only for subscribers and subscribers. The possibility will also come soon share the banned list with other creators, so as to protect the communities under attack, or decide who to receive a raid (when a streamer at the end of the live moves all the audience to another channel, ed). Unfortunately, we will never have a 100% safe environment, but we can do better and we are doing it. Above all, it is important that the message is clear: violence, bullying and intolerance have no place on Twitch and never will ”.
The analysis
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One of the points on which the company intends to work over the next few years, in addition to safety, is the ability for streamers to be discovered by potential audiences, probably one of the areas that need attention right now. At the moment, if you are not famous in some way, it is very difficult to build an audience, which is why many use Tik Tok as a showcase to show funny clips of their streams: “This is also a field where we are working – explained Scott – with the introduction of over 350 new tags to define streams and the possibility of creating new ones, we hope to offer the right meeting point between audience and streamer, as well as the possibility for followers to highlight their favorite streamers and not automatically those who have the most live audience at that moment “.
This is also due to the fact that Twitch, unlike other services, has made a precise design choice: a subscriber’s page must have as few interference as possible by the service itself: “On YouTube, while watching a video you are constantly bombarded with suggested videos and the same happens on Instagram, but for us the page and the user’s choices are sacred, we offer suggestions only on the homepage, for the rest it must be the streamer who decides who to suggest, to whom to direct the audience, which group to do part, and only if he wants to, is a precise choice to never get in the middle between the public and the creator “. Even because, irony As a result, many people who say they don’t watch television and prefer Twitch on the service end up watching talkshows, media reality shows, quarrels and even dating programs created for live shows anyway.
Beyond this, the question that snakes among fans, journalists and those who work with Twitch is the same as always when something succeeds: will it last? Are we facing a bubble or is the Twitch Generation here to stay? “The pandemic has given us a boost, but even today, when people are back out, the numbers have remained excellent. The truth is, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the stream. There are a lot of people who still don’t know what streaming is, they think it’s not for them, they think it’s only about video games, then when they find out they realize that there are a lot of interests, and a lot of people to share them with. . We we are the exact opposite of television: the chat offers the possibility to connect with the people we watch and influence their lives, the relationship that is created between the viewer and the broadcaster is much stronger, also because the public is directly involved and responsible in the success of the person who is seeing, and it is something unique ”.
And this uniqueness we have first hand at TwitchCon, in which the excitement of fans in recognizing their idols has a different nuance, that for which whoever you are meeting for you is not just a star, but almost a friend. Where is it we too got more than what we expected.