Twitch Is Letting People Vote on the Future of PogChamp

Twitch’s chat has played host to 35 different variations of the staple “PogChamp” emote over the past 35 days, and now, it’s going to be up to the community to vote on the future of the meme. The streaming platform announced this week that its holding a vote on February 12th where people will be able to tune into the event live to vote for what’ll presumably be the permanent replacement for the PogChamp emote. The vote is to take place on Friday at 12 p.m. PT, and watching the stream as it happens appears to be the only way to cast your vote.

Twitch made its PogChamp announcement on Thursday and set the time and date for the vote while relaying some statistics gathered throughout the past 35 days. The emote was “spammed over 62 million times” during that timeframe, according to Twitch. There’s no telling how that compares to the previous usage of it before the original emote was removed from the platform, but 62 million PogChamps sounds like a lot of emotes regardless.

PogChamp is one of several Twitch emotes that’s been a standard on the platform for a long time now, or at least it was until the original image for it was removed. Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, the former face of PogChamp who’s known best for that role, made incendiary remarks on social media following the events of the insurrection at the United States Capitol in January. Twitch responded by removing the PogChamp emote entirely.

That measure was only a temporary one as was the replacement solution Twitch came up with. Instead of choosing a replacement for PogChamp right away, Twitch cycled through different versions of the emote while featuring selected streamers throughout the 35 days.

The implementation of those new PogChamps did not always go smoothly, however, with some streamers facing harassment on their day as PogChamp during what would’ve otherwise been a celebratory occasion. Whether it was because they hoped someone else would be chosen or they never wanted the original PogChamp gone in the first place, vocal portions of the Twitch community had plenty to say about the idea. That won’t likely change on Friday after the votes are cast, but at least we’ll know then – or sometime soon afterwards – what the future of PogChamp will look like.