Today, Twitch let viewers vote on a new permanent Pogchamp emote. A lizard won. Frankly, it was inevitable. KomodoHype first got to be Pogchamp for a day last month as part of the intermittently disastrous Pogchamp-a-day promotion that brought us to this point, which Twitch decided to run after the original face of the popular…
Twitch’s not-so-grand Pogchamp experiment is coming to an end. After replacing the conspiracy-addled face of the popular emote with 35 different Pogchamps in 35 days, Twitch seems to be on the brink of a more permanent arrangement. Tomorrow, viewers will be able to “decide what the future of hype looks like” as part of a…
Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, and TikTokers just got a potentially very powerful ally: The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, aka SAG-AFTRA, one of the most powerful unions in Hollywood. Soon, influencers who create branded content will be able to qualify for union benefits. Speaking to Backstage, a SAG-AFTRA rep explained that…
The scene: Grand Theft Auto V’s iconic city of Los Santos. People mill about outside an apartment building, likely plotting crimes. Nothing seems out of the ordinary—except for a lone figure. Clad in suffocatingly tight leather pants and a bulletproof vest, he looks prepared for anything and nothing all at once. He also looks like…
If Emme “Negaoryx” Montgomery’s chat moderator hadn’t gotten up to use the bathroom, six million people would not have seen what happened next. During a stream last week, a viewer asked Montgomery, “What color is your thong today?” Usually, Montgomery doesn’t acknowledge those sorts of messages. But with her mod gone, the message did not…
In the past couple months, the experience of watching Twitch via third-party sites or tools like MultiTwitch has become… fraught. A purple screen sometimes obscures whatever you’re watching. It implores you to tune in on Twitch dot television instead. Eventually, it disappears. Then, every 15 minutes or so, it comes back. As of a couple…
You’ve gotta hand it to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She sure knows exactly when to hit the “go live” button on Twitch. Once again, sensing the perfect moment to address the gamerly masses, she spent a chunk of last night on Twitch talking with experts about the subreddit WallStreetBets’ shiny new technicolor meme coat. Reddit co-founder…
AverageHarry, a 15 year-old aspiring Twitch streamer from the UK, was in spitting distance of his dream. He’d had a breakout 2020, amassing an audience of nearly 90,000 followers, somewhat ironically off the back of a viral clip in which randos in a hotel lobby made fun of him for streaming. Late last year, he…
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, still the streaming world’s best-known crossover sensation even years after the peak of his relevance, sounds like he’s getting a little tired of his every action being hyper-scrutinized by millions of people all the time. In a new profile by The New York Times that, of course, opened with the requisite reference…
Donald Trump has been indefinitely suspended from Twitch. After the Capitol Building insurrection, Twitch suspended the then-president, now-professional angry baby man (who is no doubt weeks or even days from a TV deal), but with the caveat that it would “reassess his account after he leaves office.” In a statement, Twitch said that it’s turning…
Twitch’s plan to replace its problematic Pogchamp emote with a rotating cast of fresh faces? Pretty poggers. Twitch’s execution of said plan? Not poggers. Today’s Pogchamp? Also not poggers, because instead, it’s KomodoHype, a meme with some Pogchamp history. The thing about minefields is, you don’t generally realize exactly how much you’re going to regret…
There is no predicting which game Twitch will catapult into the spotlight next. Last year, it was Among Us, a previously obscure party game about deception. Now, it’s Rust, a survival game that first came out in 2013, whose heyday was thought to have long since passed. These seemingly random flavors of the month have…
It’s not every day you hear about an enormous platform like Twitch swatting the face of one of its most popular emotes clean off and rendering the president’s account indefinitely inert, as it did in the aftermath of last week’s Capitol Building insurrection. But Twitch does do similar things from time to time, on a…
For years now, Twitch’s record for most concurrent viewers on a single streamer’s channel has been hotly contested, with streamers topping each other in slow-building increments. Today, however, Spanish streamer TheGrefg made everybody else look like they’d been wrestling for discarded peanut shells. As of writing, he topped out at nearly 2.5 million—a new all-time…
In the wake of yesterday’s violent, conspiracy-fueled insurrection at the Capitol Building, Twitch has elected to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump’s Twitch account. In an email to Kotaku, a Twitch spokesperson explained the company’s rationale. “In light of yesterday’s shocking attack on the Capitol, we have disabled President Trump’s Twitch channel,” the spokesperson wrote. “Given the…
Twitch has removed the extremely popular “Pogchamp” emote from its service after the man featured in it, streamer Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, tweeted some Extremely Bad Shit about the events currently unfolding in Washington. Here’s the tweet in question, in which Gutierrez directly calls for “civil unrest” for a “#MAGAMartyr” following a shooting that took place…
Earlier this month, Republican senator Thom Tillis managed to graft an act that would turn streaming copyrighted material into a felony onto the much-debated omnibus spending bill, which also includes a paltry second covid relief check, among many other things. After even more debate (and many concessions), Congress is poised to pass the bill this…
It’s been yet another long 24 hours for Twitch—the latest in what’s shaped up to be an agonizingly long year for the company (and also everybody on Earth). Yesterday afternoon, Twitch held a live town hall with the goal of illuminating recent policy changes and features around DMCAs, sexual harassment, ads, and other hot-button issues.…
Once the year 2077 rolls around, people apparently won’t bat an eyelash at unclothed dicks, breasts, and butts. In 2020, however, this is still very much an issue, especially on Twitch, where on-screen nudity frequently results in temporary or indefinite suspensions. But the platform does make exceptions for big games, with Cyberpunk 2077 being the…
The United States government is, as we all know, extremely functional. It’s so functional, in fact, that it regularly struggles to pass spending bills in order to prevent itself from shutting down. The latest “must-pass” bill, like many of its predecessors, includes controversial measures that wouldn’t be able to pass on their own, negotiated with…
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