Here's What Twitch Thinks of Games, Streamers, and Viewers

Twitch was built-in as a identify for people to sentry video games online, just the Amazon-owned streaming service is now shifting its attention to other projects within and exterior of the gaming earth. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, the company sought to reassure the crowd that it has the all-time interests of its die-hard community of fans and streamers at center, even as it makes overtures to developers interested in using the platform to marketplace their games and heave revenue.

At its core, Twitch's attraction is a single concept that the company'southward Director of Integration Success, JT Gleason, refers to as the personal gamer identity. At GDC, he suggested that most streamers' identities are composed of the games they've played, their in-game achievements, and the Twitch communities they've joined.

For these streamers, Gleason said, showing off their gameplay on Twitch is still another form of escape from the existent world, much like the feeling they get when they're playing the actual game.

"For streamers that don't intend to make a living from streaming, they want an identity that's not really them," he said, a "pseudo-anonymous identity." There's as well a much smaller—merely infinitely more influential—category of streamers who accept garnered such a following that they're able to make a living from their Twitch streams.

"Streamers care nigh their brands on Twitch," Gleason said. "It powers their livelihood in several thousands of cases."

Twitch obviously wants to keep these two categories of streamers happy, since they stand for the site's bread and butter. To that finish, information technology has rolled out security features to weed out "name campers" (people impersonating popular streamers), equally well equally gimmicks like Drops, which reward users for watching content.

But the visitor also wants game studios to know that they, too, can make money from the immense popularity of video game streaming. Then information technology is stepping up its monetization opportunities, including the upcoming ability to buy video games from indie and big-proper name studios straight from within Twitch streams. Naturally, both developers and streamers volition have a cut of the profits.

"Twitch and game developers share a common interest, and that is for your game to grow," Gleason told developers at GDC. "There's a natural symbiosis that we want to enable and foster and support."

Simply it'southward non all most coin. Like Facebook, Twitch offers users the ability to "friend" other users. The feature rolled out last yr, and the company will before long let developers tap into friends list via APIs. The verbal features oasis't been announced however, but Gleason showed off a few possibilities at GDC, fortunately none of which involve letting game studios send spam to people's friend lists.

If you're a game developer looking to take advantage of this new integration, you might exercise well to add together a little Finnish and Aloha flair to your titles: the company says Finland is the friendliest country on Twitch, measured by the number of accepted friend requests, and Hawaii is the friendliest state.