It’ll be easier and more clearly defined than before.
Through the end of the year, Twitch is going to roll out a ton of new features they announced at TwitchCon. Among them are their pass at Discord: on-topic specific chat rooms. They’re also adding post-stream summaries so streamers know how well they were engaging their audience across the stream.
The big news to come out of that keynote address, however, were the changes to how streamers reach Affiliate and Partner status. Which is important if you want to monetize your streams. Now, there will be a sort of Achievement-like system. Follow the path of achievements, and that Partner invitation will follow.
If you follow the path Achievements lay before you, we absolutely guarantee we’ll invite you to the Affiliate or Partner program.
– Twitch Prime VP Ethan Evans, from the keynote
For many streamers, Affiliate or Partnership status is the dream, but the steps you should take to reach those goals haven’t always been clear. Achievements clarifies those requirements and encourages creators to learn streaming best practices and interact with their communities. This feature is built to give streamers a fun roadmap to achieving greater success on Twitch.
– Associate Product Marketing Manager Ryan Balke, from the keynote summary
They’re also introducing “Rituals”, which sounds like some kind of thaumatergy, but isn’t. Basically, when a user starts following a streamer, they have an opportunity to formally introduce themselves after a minute. They mean it as some kind of audience ice-breaker. I personally would never use that function, but whatever, maybe it’s helpful to people that aren’t like me.
Rituals makes it easier for you to celebrate special moments that bring your community together. Say a viewer is checking out a new channel for the first time. After a minute, she’ll have the choice to signal to the rest of the community that she’s new to the channel. Twitch will break the ice for her in Chat, and maybe she’ll make some new friends.
– Associate Product Marketing Manager Ryan Balke, from the keynote summary
There will also be raids, which seems more like they’re trying to get a handle on something out of their control. I give low odds of them succeeding, but I’ll give them an “A” for effort.
Raids are one of the most exciting things on Twitch, and now we’ve made them easier. After all, one of the best ways to grow your channel is by teaming up with other streamers. Starting in November, you can use our new Raids command (/raid) to start a raid, let your viewers join in, and then automatically host the channel you want to send your viewers to.
– Associate Product Marketing Manager Ryan Balke, from the keynote summary
So, by and large, these changes are going to make the life of a Twitch streamer easier. And they were likely necessary, since there are plenty of new stream services that want a piece of the pie. Rolling out new features like this is how you win this game of king of the hill.
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