Twitch.tv, formally known as Justin.tv, is a video game live streaming website. The streaming website was sold in 2014 to Amazon for over $1 billion. Twitch’s viewer base seems to grow every single day, with more gamers and viewers flocking to the site daily. In a normal week, I usually watch or listen to around 10 hours of content on Twitch.
I have been asked before, "Why do you watch so much? It's just someone overreacting to video games." Well, let’s think of as if it were YouTube… Who is the most subscribed to YouTuber? Pewdiepie, with over 42 million subscribers and growing. And guess what? Most of his content, if not all, is him overreacting to video games. So imagine a site that is just like Pewdiepie’s YouTube channel, but it's all live and it is called Twitch.tv.
I found Twitch in 2012 when my favorite streamer from another video game live streaming service switched over to the platform. This live streamer’s name is Sodapoppin, who currently has the ninth most followers on the website at around 1.2 million followers. Sodapoppin averages 20,000 viewers concurrently per stream and plays a variety of video games throughout each stream. Sodapoppin’s personality and gameplay have always kept me watching, and that chat of his… A wall of plebs and spam. Here is an example of his content from his personal YouTube channel.
The top video games played on Twitch include "League of Legends" and "Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft." A few times per year, Twitch viewership gets crazy during tournament time. Many huge video game tournaments are broadcasted on Twitch every year. These tournaments are watched throughout the world by sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. The two biggest video games that host these tournaments are League of Legends and Counterstrike Global Offensive (CSGO). My personal favorite live streamers include Sodapoppin (discussed above), B0aty, Reckful and Celeste56 (a smaller streamer). These streamers and others broadcast a large variety of games to their ever growing audiences and represent the Twitch platform to its greatest potential. Upon entering a popular Twitch live stream, you might see this emote.
Don’t be alarmed: This is the Kappa emote. It is spammed when you are trolling or just whenever the chat wants to. If you ever decide to join Twitch or wish to just browse the site, you must learn “Brain Power," or your experience won’t be complete. I will it link below. Happy watching.
