However, Monday’s changes were issued in the official journal, making them binding on government workers.
Not that Soma was guilty of this, but emphasizing this part before anyone overreacts: they’re only banning the words and phrases in official government use. Best of luck to them in preserving the language, but no one needs to worry they’re going around issuing citations to joueurs professionnel who say “eSports”.
Didn’t the French do something like this a number of years ago with other Internet-related words, like e-mail? I remember talking with a French friend about it over beers and laughing at the efforts of the French government to make French more relevant.
EDIT: yes, they did, back in 2003.
Does that leave Youtube as Twitch’s only real competitor?
Facebook will still be around, just not on its own app.
OK, this wasn’t terribly clear to me from the article. So everything still exists, but only if you go to the facebook.com site?
Yuuuuup
Yeah, and to further clarify, the normal Facebook app will continue. Its the specific Facebook Gaming app that’s being retired.
Similar to how Google ended youtube gaming, but youtube still exists, I guess.
New blog going over the revenue sharing plan. As you might imagine, big streamers are angry.
This morning we reached out to a subset of streamers about some upcoming changes to their agreement terms. This blog gives us an opportunity to be clear with all streamers on Twitch about those changes and talk more broadly about our strategy to help streamers make more money on our service.
Uh-oh.
For subscriptions, we use a baseline revenue share of 50/50 on the net revenue from those earnings. The vast majority of Twitch streamers have these terms in their agreement. However, for some time we did offer standard agreements with premium subscription terms to select streamers as they grew larger. This isn’t something we’ve talked about publicly, but such deals are common knowledge within the streamer community.
Okay… So what?
For these streamers still on these premium deals, we’re adjusting the deal so that they retain their 70/30 revenue share split for the first $100K earned through subscription revenue. Revenue above $100K will be split at the standard 50/50 share split. We’re announcing this change now, but it won’t go into effect until after June 1, 2023. After that point, streamers will only be affected once their existing contract is up for renewal.
Ah! There’s the sting!
For those who are affected, we wanted to make sure the impact was minimal — not just by giving them ample time before the deal goes into effect — but also by offering an alternative way to earn revenue. Our recent bump in ads revenue share to 55% as part of the Ads Incentive Program is a great way for these larger streamers to make up most, if not all, of that revenue.
“Run more ads!”
At the time of this posting, more than 22,000 of you have weighed in on UserVoice asking us to move all streamers to 70/30 and to pay streamers faster.
“Keep wishing, suckers!”
Lastly, we have to talk about the cost of our service. Delivering high definition, low latency, always available live video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive. Using the published rates from Amazon Web Services’ Interactive Video Service (IVS) — which is essentially Twitch video — live video costs for a 100 CCU streamer who streams 200 hours a month are more than $1000 per month. We don’t typically talk about this because, frankly, you shouldn’t have to think about it. We’d rather you focus on doing what you do best. But to fully answer the question of “why not 70/30,” ignoring the high cost of delivering the Twitch service would have meant giving you an incomplete answer.
“Because money!”
The idea that you make less money (as a split with Twitch) as you get more popular makes no sense. Twitch should structure their payments the opposite of that so streamers are incentivized and rewarded as they grow.
This is just them using their power as the only viable streaming service.
Maybe Epic Games will make a streaming service. (muffled laughter)
Why isn’t there competition? I thought Youtube did a lot of similar content.
It’s funny how many times I’ve seen a streamer vocalize something along the lines of wishing Mixer was back the past couple of days.
Nah, there’s no viable live streaming competitor to Twitch.
YouTube live-streaming has been pretty viable for a bit now. It’s not perfect by any means, but it seems capable of doing pretty much all the same big stuff that it used to lack compared to Twitch, and apparently discoverability is better too. Were I to start live-streaming, I’d certainly make YouTube my primary over Twitch or anything else at the moment.
That said, I’d like to see more viable alternatives, what with Twitch being a management trashfire from top-down, and YouTube having its own woes with content-ID problems/erroneous takedowns and strikes.
When I was trying, and failing, to be a full-time streamer, I switched from multistreaming to Twitch solely for a while. When making the announcement, I swear to the Prophets, multiple people were like, “Wait YouTube has streaming?”.
It’s a great platform for it, but they don’t promote it at all. I eventually worry they’re gonna kill it off, like Google does with so many things.
YouTube streaming is great from the tech and audience watchability side, but it has the same problem everyone has that’s not Twitch. It’s not Twitch.
A lot of folks just will not go anywhere but Twitch to watch streams. A bunch of popular and successful streamers found this out when they moved from Twitch to competitors like YouTube, Facebook, and Mixer in the last round of bidding. They lost huge numbers of viewers, then once their cherry contracts ran out, they had to come back to Twitch to build their base back up.
I don’t know what it would take to move that needle, but it’s just not feasible for many streamers to leave Twitch despite the new revenue plan, unless they can get the competition to pony up money to make up the difference.
YouTube could be a real competitor, but they don’t seem to really want to.
Streaming is something that happens on the side and you’ll almost never know about. It’s very much a secondary part of what they do. Twitch is basically just streaming and acts accordingly.
Twitch is most likely to beat itself at this point.
YouTube’s already the preferred platform for many non-English streamers. Guess we’ll see how things will evolve from there