Twitch Is Getting Animated Emotes

Twitch announced plans to release its "biggest emote update" ever soon which includes the addition of animated emotes. These energetic versions of the static emotes available now in Twitch can either be totally new emotes or existing ones augmented with special effects to make them move. These animated emotes will first be made available in a couple of weeks and will become more widespread by the end of the year.

Our first taste of animated emotes was provided through a post on the Twitch blog that showed a few of them in action as well as some effects added to existing emotes. Animated emotes will be locked behind subscriptions to content creators' channels, and the streamers will be able to set five animated emotes as benefits for Tier 1 fans.

Chat, come kick off ten years of Twitch with a whole new world of emotes.

We've got some special features coming soon.

Read more: https://t.co/CqXvHXGFpZ pic.twitter.com/6YKeetaryn

— Twitch (@Twitch) June 4, 2021

"With the launch of Animated Emotes, which we expect to make available to Partners in a few weeks (and Affiliates by the end of 2021), creators can add up to five new animated emotes as a benefit for Tier 1 subscribers," Twitch said about the emote plans.

Creating an animated emote from scratch isn't an instantaneous process and will require some work, however, so for those who aren't able to have their own emotes made right away, you'll be able to add one of six effects to various existing emotes: Shake, Rave, Roll, Spin, Slide In, or Slide Out. Those are the six animations for emotes that'll be available "at launch" with that wording suggesting that more are coming in the future, though that hasn't been confirmed. Those who have the resources to do so can always create their own animated emotes for their channels instead assuming they follow Twitch's guidelines for the process.

If you're thinking to yourself, "Doesn't Twitch already have animated emotes?" you'd be correct, in a way. Many people who are frequent visitors to Twitch streams already have the BetterTTV extension installed on their browsers witch makes a number of improvements to Twitch, one of which being extra emotes. BetterTTV probably won't lose any ground whenever these native animated emotes are added since people have become so accustomed to the library of emotes offered by the service.

Other plans for emotes in the future on Twitch include "Follower Emotes" to give people an incentive to follow a channel along with a library cataloguing all the available Twitch emotes for content creators to utilize.