September 08, 2019
How did a site that live streams people playing video games in their bedrooms become as big as YouTube?
Trigger happy: the amazing rise of Twitch
Chris “Sacriel” Ball’s computer is worth £20,000 and looms over me like a monolith. It is a completely silent machine, an alien spacecraft, and pulses with orange-yellow tubes of coolant, which keep the graphics card and motherboard from melting out of it like an ice pop. This machine is used to kill people: three, so far, today, but there will be countless more over the next eight hours. Behind there’s a looming greenscreen, as though Ball is an especially violent weather presenter; in front, a bank of four computer screens, each streaming an unending loop of information.
Ball is a gaming streamer. He started seven years ago on YouTube, then pivoted to Twitch. And now it supports him and a team of over 20. His house is the most beautiful home I’ve ever been to. His kitchen is a palace and his dogs are adorable. I wonder briefly if anyone would pay to watch me play Fortnite in just my pants, and what dark, awful things I would do with the ensuing wealth. Ball specialises in tactical combat games where he chillingly explodes the heads of hundreds of competing gamers, and 507 people are watching him do it right now. They are following his antics through Twitch, a website where you can watch people doing things. That’s it, that’s the entire concept. It feeds live from people’s living rooms, bedrooms and dedicated gaming rooms, out to thousands of devices at once. If YouTube is a Fast & Furious-style summer blockbuster, Twitch is the concurrent Big Brother equivalent: live cameras, often at a fixed and unflattering angles, revelling in conversational silence. Though it started out as primarily for gamers, the site has since evolved into a teeming community with people existing, doing, being on camera, and essentially performing anything as long as it is live.
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