[quote]In the almost two years since we launched Twitch Prime, it’s been exciting to see so many members of the Twitch community take advantage of one of the best deals in gaming and use perks like monthly channel subscriptions to support streamers like you.
As we have continued to add value for your viewers with Twitch Prime, we have also re-evaluated some of the existing Twitch Prime benefits. As a result, universal ad-free viewing will no longer be part of Twitch Prime for new members, starting on September 14. Twitch Prime members with monthly subscriptions will keep ad-free viewing until October 15. Members who already have annual subscriptions, or who upgrade to annual subscriptions before September 14, will continue with ad-free viewing until their next renewal date.
All other Twitch Prime benefits, like monthly channel subs, monthly games and loot, chat badges are not changing, and Twitch viewers can still get ad-free viewing across all channels by subscribing to Twitch Turbo (read about Turbo right here).
As a Twitch creator, we know you get a lot of questions from your community when changes happen on Twitch. We want to equip you with as much information as we can about this change to Prime benefits.
-Twitch[/quote]
So this is a thing that happend? I already gave me opinion in rant form here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/98wghf/sitewide_adfree_viewing_removed_from_twitch_prime/e4j88f3/
So does this change anyone's mind on using twitch for streaming? Personally I'm considering giving SteamTV a try, should that actually become a proper streaming platform. Either way, I'll be canceling Amazon Prime and not giving Twitch any more money than needed (some people deserve their subscriptions, even if I have to use paypal for that now).
Edit: Their blog post on this update: https://blog.twitch.tv/uk-changes-to-twitch-prime-ba50b61565ca?j=6922&sfmc_sub=55190862&l=15_HTML&u=139198&mid=100002038&jb=523 Twitch Turbo on the help portal for reference: https://help.twitch.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/973896-twitch-turbo
^ This doesn't invalidate all the other reasons Twitch is a good streaming platform. I don't see this making many people switch, especially streamers themselves.
I use an adblocker on Twitch and have never payed for Twitch Prime so this doesn't really affect me personally in terms of how many ads I have to watch, but it is unfortunate since I'm sure it will mean a lot less people will be paying for Twitch Prime, which means the pool of people willing to sub to me just because they can is going to get a lot smaller.
"So does this change anyone's mind on using twitch for streaming?" I think any serious streamer who wants to be successful and is already on Twitch kinda has to stay there (especially if they're full time and don't want their income to significantly drop). I don't think this is going to make a significant difference to how many people use Twitch. It's still going to be the biggest platform by a lot. Having a few annoying and unfortunate quirks really isn't going to change that.
Video ads are horrible and you should always block them. The fractions of pennies streamers get from ads just isn’t worth it. This is a stupid change and makes no sense other than Twitch trying to pad their bottom line at the expense of users.
@Liv I use uBlock Origin and that seems to block ads on every platform that I use it with, including Twitch.
@Quivico I'm trying my best to think of what I'd lose if I switched to YTG right now immediatly, other than the extra work than entails, because I'd have to figure out streamlabs' stuff again and my bot would be useless until there's an update with YTG integration, which currently is not even being worked on. I can't really come up with anything in particular to be honest.
@ShikenNuggets [quote]I think any serious streamer who wants to be successful and is already on Twitch[/quote] I actually watched a few VoDs on youtube for unrelated reasons (I bingewatch youtube too much in general and a series I started turned into a livestream project) and noticed that the mid tier popularity streamers on there also seem to be making quite a lot. One streamer even had a small group of people who'd donate/superchat literally every stream. Of course switching platforms basically means restarting from scratch while asking your viewerbase to jump ship, but for small streamers with no or not many regular viewers, that doesn't really matter.
[quote]Having a few annoying and unfortunate quirks really isn't going to change that.[/quote] I'm not sure about this still counting as a small quirk. I remember hearing something like "all benefits previously included in Twitch Turbo" when getting Prime and now Turbo is apparently back again, reason being something about wanting to help creators, but even back before Prime Turbo's ad-free had already counted as a viewed ad, therefore not losing creators anything at all. It just doesn't make sense and to me personally just sounds like a bad excuse, similar to the aftertaste that a lot of recent sub gift and bits related updates brought for me personally.
@Liv I'd love to include Mixer in my rants here, but I kept forgetting that I made an account there. Personally to me the most functional site would likely still be youtube, because it let's me archive streams as private (I'm just assuming that those vods wouldn't lose the chat log, comments do get disabled) in addtion to my higher quality local recordings that I use for highlights either way. YouTube also has lots of API possibilites that I could explore. Twitch's API is a mess, they still haven't fixed the embed player's missing js file. But if Mixer or the upcoming SteamTV want to put in the work of doing stuff better than twitch, I'm going to give them a try as well.
This update annoys me quite a bit, but it's not my Prime account anyways (I love my Mommy) so I can't complain too much about something I'm not paying for anyways. It's a clear push for Twitch to grab a little bit more money to pad their numbers. I hadn't considered jumping ship, since Twitch has been home for the better part of 5 years for me (viewing for 4-5 years and streaming on and off for 3) but if they keep nickle and dimeing everybody, then people will start looking elsewhere, myself included.
I've seen these things happen in the past with people suddenly jumping ship. The platform they jump to ends up staying small and unheard of before fizzling out. You can make the jump if you want, but as garbage as Twitch can be at times I have yet to see an even decent alternative.
Not defending Twitch's decisions, I've got plenty of reasons to hate them myself, but "THE YEAR OF HITBOX" won't come unless the alternative is actually fucking good.
tl;dr get ublock and tell twitch to suck one on the ads