Join us for the Twitch Rivals x Fortnite Summer Skirmish
Fortnite fans, rejoice! We’re excited to announce Twitch Rivals will be featuring Fortnite as one of its games for this month, with $2 million in tournament prizes at stake.
The events span across four days, two events per day, with the first on August 17. Each will be a part of Epic Games’ ongoing Fortnite Summer Skirmish Series, including 49 duo teams from EU or NA competing for $260,000 in their respective regions.
The first event in the four-event series starts Friday, August 17 with the European tournament at 9 AM PT followed by the North American tournament at 2 PM PT. You can catch all of the action on twitch.tv/TwitchRivals or watch some of the streamers’ perspectives on their own channels:
Tournament Dates
Friday, August 17
Saturday, August 18
Friday, August 24
Saturday, August 25
Tournament Hours
The Entertainment Software Association doesn't track race, though it found in 2017 that 55 percent of video game players in the US were men. The International Game Developers Association attempts to distill the global, professional gaming industry each year in a detailed survey, and in 2017 it found 74 percent of respondents identified as men and 21 percent as women. Meanwhile, 68 percent identified as white and just 1 percent as black. As the IGDA noted, "This is inconsistent with the 2016 US census data which reported that 61 percent of the US population was white, 13 percent was black."
Twitch seems to mirror these skewed statistics.
"'Welcome everyone' is a core value at Twitch," a spokesperson told Engadget. "It helps to guide the policy, staff, community, tools and technology dedicated to fostering a safe, positive experience on Twitch every day. It also inspires the programs we have to celebrate and support our diverse community members including our own annual site-wide holiday, TwitchUnity, as well as at TwitchCon."
Twitch said it doesn't share details about specific streamers when it comes to becoming a Partner, out of respect for their privacy. The spokesperson added, "Our Partnerships team often field follow-up questions from streamers who are pursuing Partnership in order to provide additional guidance. We also have the Twitch Creator Camp, Achievements and Stream Summary, and the Affiliates program, which are designed to help pave the way to Partnership and provide more clarity on the process."
More than 2.2 million streamers go live on Twitch every month, and there are more than 272,000 Partners and Affiliates on the site. Lopez figured that with a growing audience, a focus on an underserved community and a featured spot during TwitchUnity, BGG met all the requirements to become Partner. That wasn't the case.
We didn't make Partner fam 😭 https://t.co/NZwSWBTgpw — Black Girl Gamers (@Official_BGG) August 3rd, 2018
"I don't like the fact that it's kind of a contradiction when you have certain Twitch streamers saying the n-word on stream and you're just counting it as a bad day, as opposed to actually tackling that behavior," Lopez said. "I do feel like token diversity is a buzzword. Tokenizing people of color, using them to just seem progressive is definitely a thing. But I feel like, from my perspective, I will use that to my benefit."
Lopez plans to apply for Partnership again, which is something other streamers have had to do before succeeding. Until then, she's continuing to stream and drive conversations about diversity in the gaming industry as a whole -- and on Twitch specifically.
Earlier this month, Twitch announced it would remove its Communities feature in September and replace these groups with a tagging system. Communities allow streamers to build and find audiences around specific topics or games and then moderate those spaces, keeping out trolls and making sure things stay on topic. Tags don't serve the same purpose: Anyone will be able to label their streams however they want, without fear of moderation. For example, a streamer will be able to join the Positivity collection, only to spew hate.
Members of BGG, The Cookout (a Twitch community for people of color) and other streaming fans immediately hit Twitter to express disappointment, disbelief and anger at Twitch's decision to ditch Communities.
So in case you haven't heard the news, @Twitch is removing Communities because "they werent being used" which means that The Cookout Community page that we've built up over this past year wont exist a month from now. We will have to come up with new ways to find each other. pic.twitter.com/95fKSgTwB0 — The Villain. (@DennyVonDoom) August 9th, 2018
"We've had trolls trying to stream to the Black Girl Gamers community," Lopez said. "We've had to physically remove them, because obviously they don't adhere to the requirements and that's not the space for them. The space is a safe space. They have the whole of Twitch, really, to stream in, literally." The decision to remove Communities, Lopez continued, "Kind of does target the disenfranchised streamers of Twitch."
Twitch told Engadget that it's collecting feedback on its plans to shut down Communities, quoting a blog post that reads, in part, "When we learned that less than 3 percent of Twitch viewership came from users who found streams using Communities, it was clear that Communities were not helping viewers find new streamers to watch."
A spokesperson added, "As with all changes we make to Twitch, our goal is to help make creators successful, so we will continue to listen to the community and to analyze and adapt new initiatives."
"We just want to make sure that we're heard."
Lopez works on BGG in her free time, when she's not at her full-time job. She spends her time building relationships with like-minded partners, seeking funding, starting conversations and playing games, of course. BGG is a passion project and a chance to shift the video game industry toward inclusion, away from homogenization.
"In terms of black women specifically, we do feel like we're always left out or we're always a trope or a stereotype when it comes to characters," Lopez said. "We just want to make sure that we're heard, our voices. We also play the games, and we do have input into what happens. People hit up developers for any which reason they have an issue with a game. Why can't we talk about why you haven't included us from the get-go?"
BGG recently launched a store, and Lopez was featured in a video campaign from UK retailer GAME in April. The group is growing, as is its reach.
"I would like Black Girl Gamers to be a hub for gaming from the nuanced cultural perspective," Lopez said. "Obviously BGG is for black girl gamers, but also talking about different cultures. ... I really see that being a hub for multiple different perspectives: perspectives on tech, perspectives on gaming, perspectives on events, on new games, old games, nostalgia, cosplaying, all these things. Being an alternative person, I think, will be the coverage."
That final goal should hold true, at least until nonwhite, non-male people aren't seen as the "alternative" in the video game industry any longer.
YouTube has become synonymous with online video and the lucrative advertising that it commands. Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch streaming site is the go-to place for the much smaller audience of video gaming enthusiasts. Now, in a bid to grab a larger slice of the online advertising pie, Amazon has decided to aggressively broaden the programming on Twitch to take on its video rival.
Amazon in recent months has been pursuing exclusive livestreaming deals with dozens of popular media companies and personalities, many with large followings on YouTube. Twitch is offering minimum guarantees of as much as a few million dollars a year, as well as a share of future advertising sales and subscription revenue, according to several people who’ve been contacted by Twitch.
The company has approached everyone from lifestyle influencer Gigi Gorgeous to actor Will Smith about streaming live. While some talent has resisted a few of Amazon’s terms, such as a minimum number of hours of livestreaming per week, a few deals have closed. Tanner Braungardt, a prankster from Kansas with 4 million subscribers on YouTube, for instance, has also signed onto Twitch. And the National Basketball Association struck a deal to stream minor league games on the service. “There will be a steady drumbeat of lots of new content we’re bringing on,” says Michael Aragon, Twitch Interactive Inc.’s senior vice president of content. “We’re growing well, and that makes us an attractive destination for people looking to do new things in live, interactive entertainment.”
For now, it’s a David vs. Goliath battle. YouTube, the largest advertising-supported video site in the world, has about 1.9 billion monthly viewers; Twitch gets about 15 million a day. But the Amazon unit gives creators multiple ways of making money, including paid subscriptions (a feature YouTube added in response), and offers advertisers the appeal of a live, engaged audience. Amazon, which saw its ad sales in the first quarter exceed $2 billion for the first time mostly by selling “sponsored products” slots during product searches, analysts estimate, has already become a credible contender in online advertising to Google and Facebook Inc.
Game On Data: ComScore
At a recent staff meeting, Twitch Chief Executive Officer Emmett Shear set a target of $1 billion in ad sales for Twitch, according to three people present. That’s more than double its current sales. Twitch’s key advantage, besides being live, is its popularity among young men who tend to be resistant to ads. The average Twitch user has stopped paying for cable TV and employs technology to block advertising across the internet. But hundreds of thousands of these hard-to-reach viewers tune in daily to watch top video game streamers, such as Ninja, Twitch’s biggest star.
YouTube has tried to blunt Twitch’s efforts by offering big payments to some of its top creators if they agree not to make exclusive deals with other sites. “YouTube is pretty nervous,” says Chad Stoller, chief innovation officer at media agency UM Global. YouTube declined to comment for this story.
Rafi Fine, who with his brother runs some of the biggest channels on YouTube through their Fine Brothers Entertainment, has had discussions with Twitch officials about making original series. Fine says he can’t imagine abandoning YouTube, but Twitch might offer his company a better home for live programming—and more money. “Twitch has a way to be not a killer, but a competitor to what YouTube does,” he says.
The vast majority of Twitch’s visitors come to watch others play video games. While e-sports are booming, many marketers still associate gaming with nerds who live in their parents’ basements. Twitch didn’t let users post videos that weren’t gaming-related when Amazon paid almost $1 billion for the company in 2014. A year later, Amazon introduced Twitch Creative, which helped nongamers such as chefs and artists to stream live. The site has since hosted livestream marathons of old episodes of Saturday Night Live and celebrity chef Julia Child, plus some live sports. There’s no better sign of Twitch’s interest in nongaming video than its popular chef streamer Christine, a 32-year-old Californian who films herself baking and cooking five days a week for a show called CookingForNoobs. Her rules: Be positive, avoid cursing, and don’t feed the trolls.
“Few brands are excited about reaching an audience of hardcore gamers,” says Justin Warden, CEO of Ader Inc., a marketing agency that specializes in e-sports. “More brands are excited about working with an influencer or personality.” Ader helped Walt Disney Co. market the DVD release of Black Panther on Twitch and is signing clients who specialize in anime and card playing, plus gamers as adept at humor as a joystick.
Two of the fastest-growing genres on Twitch are livestreams of TV shows and “IRL,” or in real life, videos—where posters welcome fans into their world for a few hours at a time. IRL videos are an unedited version of the video blog, or vlog, one of the dominant genres on YouTube.
Few people can marshal their fans to buy books, tickets, or makeup like online influencers, the youthful vloggers and comedians who rule YouTube. So Amazon has an added incentive for wooing them to Twitch. Still, rivals have attempted to compete with YouTube for years, with little to show for it. Verizon Communications Inc. struggled to attract users to its video app Go90 before folding it this year. Facebook has pursued online creators for its Watch video section, but it isn’t yet a major source of revenue for most online talent.
Yet YouTube’s grip on the creators has never been more tenuous. Its investments in new areas such as TV and music have left some creators feeling unloved. And its crackdown on which videos are eligible for ads has reduced revenue for some of its top stars. “YouTube has been confusing the creator community,” says David Tochterman, who represents creators who work with both YouTube and Twitch. YouTube’s constant tweaks to the algorithms that power its site have a big effect on views for YouTubers, who can no longer rely on the site to be their sole source of revenue, he says.
Nichole Boyd started posting YouTube videos in 2010 and has about 500,000 subscribers to her channel, which features home cleaning and organization tips. YouTube advertising remains her largest revenue source, but like many influencers, she wants to cultivate other platforms so sudden changes to algorithms or rules don’t kill her business. People directed to Amazon from her YouTube posts spend as much as $60,000 a month at the online retailer, and she gets a commission on everything they buy within 24 hours of visiting Amazon through a link from her channel. “I do pretty good there because a lot of the products I have in my videos and use in my home are sold on Amazon,” she says.
Amazon reached out to her earlier this year about creating two videos a week for a kind of home shopping network-style program with several other online influencers, Boyd says. She’s interested in the idea—and likely so are YouTube executives. —With Spencer Soper
