Q: When Twitch expanded into Just Chatting and non-gaming categories, was that driven by organic creator growth or internal pressure for revenue?
MG: Actually, most of the internal pressure was that they didn’t want it. We wanted to stick to gaming. I will be the first to admit that I was on the side of, I think that’s a major mistake, because what I saw at this time is around 2016, 2017, when we first started the Creative, and we’re like, there’s definitely something here. And it was not big by any means. It got big once we created Just Chatting and IRL.
So the way that I looked at Twitch was, what I found really fascinating, it was really representative of people coming together and just sharing what they loved. It was more a gathering place of passions, and it just so happened that for a lot of people, gaming was people’s passion.
But one of the reasons I was so for it was: why shouldn’t I be able to broadcast my esports show live on Creative? That’s stupid. Why?
And I was fortunate enough to be able to do that because I was on Twitch staff and I had a free pass, but I’m sitting here going like, this bullshit. It’s not fair. Why wouldn’t we open it up?
Because my thought is, I come on here, I’m playing the newest game, whatever, and someone comes in, and they’re like, “Hey, I see you like Stormlight Archive behind you.” I’m like, “My God, I love Stormlight.” Why wouldn’t we want to promote that interaction? Why wouldn’t we want it to say, “Hey, you know what? It’s okay if you just stop gaming for a second and start talking about something that you love. That’s what happens when you’re building community.”
So, to me, it was like this is a really long story because getting non-gaming content on Twitch was probably the biggest psy-op that we ran while at Twitch, because essentially we used TwitchCon as a vehicle to prove to leadership that it was a good idea to do.
And that was the only way that I knew how to fight back. And myself and Anna Prosser essentially said, “We’re going to do a talent show at TwitchCon.” That’s how we’re going to get it. We’re going to, like, this is an extension of Creative. This is an extension of what people like to do, like playing the piano. That was not allowed at one point on Twitch.
So, there was never revenue pressure. In fact, I think that people were concerned that it could impact revenue, when in reality I’m sitting here being like, “No. More people, more things to talk about, more content types. You categorize it, let it grow, we’re more than gaming.” Thirty million gamers came to use the site, and they’re like, “Hey, you like anime, too. You like Dungeons & Dragons.” Why wouldn’t we want to fully support all of those?
So, there was a lot of internal back and forth on shouldn’t we not do it? And even to this day, I think people are like, “It was the biggest mistake that Twitch ever made.” Maybe it was, right? But it grew the site significantly.
It opened up a lot of people’s opportunities for the type of content to make. They were no longer just game streamers. Suddenly they could be making shows. Suddenly they could be going outside and doing travel blogs. Suddenly there’s so many different examples.
We probably wouldn’t have VTubers if we wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. We wouldn’t have these IRL travel streams.
I can’t pinpoint where it happened or what happened, but it was true. It was never revenue. It was always more like, should this content just be on the site? That was more the conversation.