Recently, more and more huge content creators have moved over to different platforms, with big names like Ninja and Shroud moving to Mixer, 100Thieves members CourageJD and Valkyrae moving to YouTube, and DisguisedToast even moving to Facebook.

Now the question, is: Will these companies EVER surpass Twitch on the leaderboard for most hours watched, even if they pay huge amounts of money to essentially “buy over” multiple big names?

Well, I certainly think not.

First, the interface.

The way that Twitch organizes its website is certainly far beyond any other streaming platform right now. They have a clean design, with everything that a viewer wants easily accessible just on the front page. Streams on the left, chat on the left, and any social information under the stream itself.

I mean, just look at Facebook Gaming’s design. It doesn’t compare whatsoever.

Along with the unappealing design and the lack of accessibility to descriptions, subscription buttons, and chat activity, Facebook just isn’t suited (at least right now) for any major streaming popularity. After all, it’s was made for social media – not for people to stream their video games.

The chat uses people’s REAL NAMES and is onto of the stream itself – who would want to reveal their real information just to talk to strangers? It just isn’t appropriate or private, and it’s certainly something that Facebook needs to heavily work on.

But Twitch’s popularity isn’t solely rooted within its interface. For example, Microsoft’s Mixer has great accessibility and is pleasing to the eye – what’s wrong there?

Though Mixer has a pretty decent interface, Twitch has it completely beat with the chat and the emotes. Twitch, over its years (though it’s been a relatively short time), has inspired third party tools such as BTTV and FFZ that HEAVILY influence how the chat operates. But before these tools came into place, Twitch already had a staggering amount of good emotes (or emoticons) that allowed a viewer to express what they thought was going on.

Just as an example, this emote would show up whenever you typed “PogChamp” in the chatroom:

Clearly, it’d be used to express a sense of amazement or show that you thought what the streamer was doing was super cool.

Third party extensions like BTTV and FFZ only added to these emotes that people could use, and even used viral memes like Pepe the Frog to express a sense of worry or terror with the emote “monkaS”.

And the best part of it is that all of these emotes could be created by absolutely anyone with just an account on Twitch, certainly inspiring a lot of creativity.

The emotes that have grown allow people to feel much more involved within the chat itself, furthering the sense of an avid community of viewers. Mixer, Facebook, and YouTube don’t currently have options for these types of things to exist, and I honestly don’t seem them implementing things like this in the very near future, which is at their own loss.

One of the unfair things about this whole live-streaming competition is the sole fact that Amazon and Twitch have been in the market for a much longer period of time. And in that time, they’ve been able to grow a solid foundation and community, something that the other services can’t get just by buying off popular streamers.

Twitch even has an annual event called TwitchCon – a convention where viewers can get to know other viewers and friends that they met through Twitch, as well as their favorite streamers to get pictures or autographs. This event only helps to improve the already solid community that Twitch has a reputation of holding.

For a community like Twitch’s to grow, it’ll certainly take much more time and effort for other platforms to create this sense of shared connections between viewers and streamers. It’s something that the other services simply don’t have, and haven’t had the time to nurture.

And to finish, I’ll just let the numbers do the talking.

Despite the buying of popular streamers, YouTube and Mixer’s numbers have stayed far below that of Twitch’s. Instead of using money to build infrastructure and set up a foundation for viewers to enjoy, they’ve only purchased big names to help bring over fans, something that clearly hasn’t work.

Although I personally think that Twitch will stay at the top for a long, long time, it does have its fair share of problems. Just as an example, their administrators, in their banning patterns based on streamers breaking the rules of terms of service, has been inconsistent and sometimes even controversial, as seen by the community. Perhaps the other sites can capitalize on Twitch’s mistakes.

And I hope they do – competition can only be good for Twitch. It’ll spark more innovation and adaptability within the whole of the live-streaming community.

-DZ