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Twitch Declares Open Season on Bot Maker, Sellers, And Users

Twitch is ready to show the rest of the world that they run a tight ship.

Twitch has announced that they will be multiplying their efforts in dealing with both viewer bot suppliers and buyers.

The popular streaming service has been making several updates to their terms of use. Any Twitch streamer caught using bots for the purpose of artificially inflating their viewer, rating, or popularity could be looking at a lifetime ban or even a lawsuit.

And to show that they do mean business, TwitchTV will already be taking legal action against seven bot services which are well-known among the communities.

Statistics currently show that viewer-bots are used by a small percentage of the entirety of streamers, but Twitch believes that any form of artificial popularity boosting has powerful damaging effects on both viewers and streamers.

Twitch enjoys partnering up with popular streamers. A partnership with Twitch means that the streamers’ viewers will proportionally influence how much of a profit the streamer makes. The extra profit motivates the streamers to broadcast high-quality content, and the high-quality content increases Twitch’s popularity, bringing along more viewers for everyone.

If a streamer buys viewer-bots to increase their popularity, they can be seen as stealing from Twitch. The streamer is making profits based on a fake viewership number, but this is not actually TwitchTV’s pet peeve.

The illegitimate streamer will not be motivated to release high-quality content because they are not motivated to keep their viewers, knowing they will have a high number of viewers anyway. The streamer is also occupying a slot in the popular streamers section, pushing new streamers further down the list and denying them the chance to be found by viewers faster.

TwitchTV engineers have been developing new faster, discreet, and efficient tools to help them search for and kick all view-bots and chatbots. Their platform, Twitch said, will continue to improve and update until they deal with the issue entirely.

The streaming service is also appealing individually to channel moderators to do their part and report any form of suspicious or unmotivated spike in viewership or any bogus or artificial chat activity.

They will also be suing seven of the most well-known bot makers and sellers. Twitch plans to open new lawsuits against any other bot creator or distributor they identify until their platform will be bot-free.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Amazon Allegedly Acquires Twitch for $1billion

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Google was close to buying Twitch just a couple of months ago. The interest shown by the tech-giant made sense, as Twitch could have been combined its services with Google to offer better services for gamers. Moreover, Google is always interested in expanding its already gigantic user-base.

Other companies are interested in Twitch as well. Amazon allegedly acquires Twitch, according to the latest rumors. On Monday, the website The Information claims that Amazon will pay $1 billion for the video game streaming site. Neither Amazon, nor Twitch, have released any comments so far on the matter.

Twitch was introduced in June 2011. Its main focus is represented by video games. Basically, the platform, which is now one of the largest sources of web-traffic in the U.S., offers playthroughs of video games by users. Moreover, visitors can view content live or on-demand.

So far, Twitch managed to raise $35 million, with $20 million only in September 2013, Re/Code notes.

Video games are among the most popular form of content on YouTube, Reuters reports. So for Google, this will be a loss. For regular users, on the other hand, enjoying more diverse video platforms may be a good thing. YouTube announced in June that it will add new video tools for creators. Among the most important is the ability to upload videos at 60 fps, a highly relevant feature for gamers.

Amazon allegedly acquires Twitch to catch-up with Google and Netflix

Most gamers are young and represent an important target for most tech-companies. There are around one million gamers who upload their recordings each month, while around 50 million unique visitors as of last month watch them and comment. Not only that there are a lot of unique monthly visitors, but they are very engaged with the web-site. Re/Code says that according to a Twitch report, close to 60 percent of the visitors spend more than 20 hours per week on Twitch.

The problem for Amazon will be how exactly to monetize the acquisition. Younger men are harder to reach, but Amazon may adapt its Prime subscriptions to the new video business. Some of the users who upload their recordings on Twitch ask for donations or subsctiptions, so Amazon will have to deal with this type of engagement. Amazon allegedly acquires Twitch, so it will probably have to find another method of reward the broadcasters, in order to retain them on the platform.

Twitch Joins Google Too. Is There Anything Left to Buy?

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If we didn’t know any better, we could say that, in the last week, Google went out shopping and forgot to come back home. After shaking hands with Quest Visual and Divide, now Twitch joins Google too, in a deal that involves an all-cash offer from Google.

Rumor in the street is that the purchase is worth more than $1 billion. What is Twitch and why did Google send its subsidiary YouTube to make the purchase? And why pay so much for a company in the first place?

The things become clearer the moment you find out a few details about Twitch.

Twitch is a video game streaming service which allows people to broadcast live gameplay footage from their PC or games consoles, together with audio commentary and webcam footage, and has become hugely popular with the online gaming community. At the end of 2013 the service had 45 million monthly users. The service makes money through video ads as well as through subscriptions, with the company saying that 300,000 of its users had a subscription to at least one channel.

According to Daniel Bean from Yahoo Tech,

Twitch is regarded to be the most popular service of its kind for gamers, with roughly 45 million unique visitors monthly. That’s up from 30 million unique visitors last year. In terms of bandwidth, Twitch’s traffic is higher than Hulu, Amazon, and Facebook. It’s mammoth, even if you’ve never heard of it.

So why does YouTube (and implicitly Google) need Twitch?

The equation is simple: add together one of the largest video – game live streaming sources with the largest video streaming source and you’ll see why Twitch is an important growth factor for both YouTube and Google. Ad revenue aside, Google is known for purchasing its competitors. Reports show that

in the area of live streaming in general, video gaming or otherwise, YouTube lags behind Twitch, which accounted for nearly 44 percent of all streaming traffic for a period this past April.

On the other hand, Twitch is said to have refused a previous offer from Microsoft, but embraced Google’s take-over proposal. Why sell yourself to Google? Commentators say that Twitch joins Google for the same reasons other companies did in the past: look at YouTube and at what Google managed to do with it. It is a unique opportunity for Twitch to benefit from everything YouTube and Google have to offer, technologically and popularity – wise. Analysts consider this deal as a remarkable win – win situation for both parties. So far, nobody from Twitch or YouTube confirmed the purchase, but we still have time to find out!