Twitch is soaring. The streaming platform’s 2015 retrospective said 241,441,823,059 minutes were streamed last year, with about 1.7 million people broadcasting each month. As of last year, there were supposedly around 550,000 average concurrent viewers, and the past peak concurrent viewer figure was 2,098,529 on August 23, 2015. It’s big business. So big, in fact, that Twitch has decided microtransactions are in order.
Not that they’re actually called microtransactions. Twitch is trying to throw people off by referring to this new mechanic as “Cheering,” an activity and emoji people can share in a chat after purchasing “Bits” with real money from the company. Once someone has paid the toll, they can cheer in the chat. Varying animations allude to how much they’ve paid. Badges can be earned for cheering, perhaps to show you’re a high roller.
It sounds questionable, right? I mean, here Twitch is giving people an opportunity to give them money, all so they can perform a completely cosmetic action in a chat and show off to strangers. It’s an optional experience, but it sounds like a selfish one, right? Well, I think Twitch just did a bad job of labeling and executing this in-beta mechanic. Really, it’s a form of donating.
Players are able to cheer in chats of streams they enjoy on Twitch. A portion of the money they spend on the cheer will go to the person they’re watching. It’s a means of telling the streamer and other viewers that you’re enjoying the show so much, you want to throw money at the person making it possible. It’s a more flowery donate button, only with a middleman and weird incentive program attached to it.
The only thing really wrong with the Twitch cheering program, at the moment, is a lack of experience and clarity. The way it’s framed right now, people are going to be distracted by the fanfare. They may overlook the fact that people who create content will be getting a cut. Especially since Twitch hasn’t said exactly what percentage of a cheer will go to a streamer. There’s also a little too much focus on the person cheering, with them getting badges to show off or perhaps lured into bigger cheers with more frivolous animations. But again, both of these issues could be resolved once its out of beta.
Microtransactions are, sadly, becoming a fact of life. They’re in our apps and our games. Now, they’re coming to Twitch too. At least we can take solace in knowing that these incentives may not be as insidious as they seem. Once they’re out of beta and we have all the facts, it could be as a simple as making a big deal out of donating to a livestreamer we enjoy. You know, unless Twitch decides said streamer only gets 10-15% of the money from a cheer and the company gets the lion’s share. Then, we’d have a problem.