Twitch Streamers Are Furious Following New Changes; Some Threaten to Leave Platform

Twitch streamers are pretty furious following the company's decision to drastically change how much money it takes from content creators. Twitch is one of the biggest platforms on the internet and that's largely because of the creators who have streamed on it for years. Without creative, entertaining creators, there would be no Twitch. The Amazon-owned platform has rewarded its creators over the years with new features and money via donations, subscriptions, and more. Amazon even introduced a feature that allows viewers to connect their Amazon Prime accounts and give a streamer one free sub every month, pretty much giving the streamer free money. 

Well, there's a big change coming and people are incredibly unhappy about it. Hours after confirming Twitch would be regulating the kind of gambling content on its platform, it burnt away a lot of the goodwill that came with that news by announcing something many had dreaded. Twitch has confirmed that is reducing its 70/30 sub split for all streamers down to 50/50, meaning creators lose about 20% of their previous income. Now, the 50/50 model has been in place for some time, but for bigger streamers who dominated the platform and grew quickly, they got the 70/30 split. Those who are currently on the 70/30 model will be able to retain that for the first $100k earned through subs, but after that, it's split 50/50. These changes will be put into effect in June 2023. Streamers can offset this by running more ads as Twitch has confirmed its ad share is now 55%. Twitch also noted that the reasons for doing so is due to the costs of running the platform and so it can reinvest the money into more employees and products. Some streamers found the reasoning questionable given Twitch already doesn't add a ton of meaningful new features, has no shortage of moderation issues, and is also run by the massive tech giant that is Amazon.

Of course, Twitch streamers are pretty angry about this and some creators like Jerma are even threatening to leave the platform outright. While a few years ago, Twitch may have shrugged this off, the streaming climate has changed. YouTube is a major player in the streaming space and is rapidly growing with creators like Ludwig, TimTheTatman, and Valkyrae. YouTube has also become the home for DrDisrespect after his Twitch ban, though he doesn't have any exclusive contract like the aforementioned streamers.

What do you think of Twitch's decision? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder. You can view some reactions to the news below.