Stream Big by Grayson, Nathan;

The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen

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A termék adatai:

Kiadó Atria Books
Megjelenés dátuma 2026. április 23.
Kötetek száma Trade Paperback

ISBN 9781982156770
Kötéstípus Puhakötés
Terjedelem288 oldal
Méret 212x139x18 mm
Nyelv angol

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Számítógépes játékok Általános gazdasági, üzleti könyvek Értékesítés, kereskedelem További könyvek a gazdaság területén Játékok

Rövid leírás:

The definitive story of the streaming platform Twitch told through the lives of its biggest creators, providing a portrait of how the booming livestream ecosystem is reshaping technology, entertainment, business, and culture.

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Hosszú leírás:

Told through the diverse and fascinating careers of nine streamers, this is a “timely and insightful dive into the players and politics of one of the twenty-first century’s most influential modes of media” (Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine), examining how Twitch has revolutionized technology, entertainment, business, and pop culture.

With 2.5 million viewers at any given moment, the streaming platform Twitch is in the lead and often well beyond mainstream networks like CNN and Fox during primetime. On Twitch, the Amazon-owned tech behemoth, the biggest personalities, like Kai Cenat, F&&&233;lix “xQc” Lengyel, and Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, can earn millions per year by firing up their internet connection and going live.

Veteran technology and gaming journalist Nathan Grayson “captures the multitudes contained within Twitch while offering a captivating window into content creators’ lives” (Publishers Weekly), especially those who helped make the platform into a billion-dollar global business. From Twitch’s early days of rapid growth to acquisition by Amazon to the defection of creators and rival platforms, Grayson makes the radical argument that many social technology companies are far more dependent on their creators than the creators are on their platforms.

Told through nine exceptional Twitch creators whose on-screen personalities helped the company grow into a powerhouse, this is the explosive and “necessary” (Mark Bergen, author of Like, Comment, Subscribe) story of when entertainment meets the internet in the era of social and video content domination.

BleedPurple, riffing on the slogan of a local hockey team.

“I was thanking [Twitch staff members] for being involved not just for streamers or large video game studios and trying to build those relationships, but for caring about indie developers,” says Plante. “I was just basically being a fan of how everything felt so tight-knit back at that time. I really wanted to inject myself in that because it gave me energy. It was just such a wonderful buzz.”

Before long, Twitch staff let her know that employees had begun using the slogan internally, as well as at parties: “There was a party in 2014 where they had started to use it printed out on regular paper, pasted on the walls, because that was the budget they had for parties back then,” says Plante.

Twitch hired Plante for a community-focused role in 2015, and it used the slogan to announce that she was joining the company. “That was really special for me,” she says. “And then it became something I started to see on every banner and billboard that they made. They made it their official thing after that.”

“Bleed Purple” became Twitch’s official slogan, Plante believes, because the underlying sentiment resonated not just with Twitch employees, but everybody who used the platform.

“It was something that took off because of a strong sense of community,” she says. “It wasn’t just me or Twitch staff who said it. It became something that streamers, smaller and larger, began to use constantly. Everyone felt that way. It was a very contagious sense of identity and inclusion.”

In some cases, Twitch wound up stopping major event streams from falling apart at the seams. Ignacio proved instrumental in this regard. Before Twitch hired him, he was a community college student living with his parents, with short black hair and an unassuming, blue jeans-clad style, which disguised a person with boundless expertise in a field that had just barely begun to exist. Streaming was just a hobby, but Ignacio had a preternatural knack for squeezing blood from stones, hacking together a livestreaming setup involving obscure Russian software to ensure his video game streams looked better than anybody else’s without his modest computer going up in flames. Before long, he gained a reputation for using his whiz-kid know-how to save esports events whose livestreams were collapsing under the weight of high-end graphics and rickety internet connections. That piqued the interest of folks like Lin, which led to a job at Justin.tv. Before long, Ignacio, whose irrepressible enthusiasm made him talk so fast that it seemed his mouth couldn’t keep up with his brain, was helping Twitch solve tech problems at its San Francisco home base and in the field.

For Ignacio, working at Twitch was a dream come true, but as Twitch came to both embed itself in the gaming community and rely on esports for viewership, he got a front-row seat to the most precarious elements of the platform’s business.

“I feel like I have all this personal PTSD from handling these tumultuous moments in the field of ‘Oh wow, this is something that’s never happened in existence. I need to solve it immediately for this event to not be a crippling failure,’?” he says.

Some events, like the debut of livestreaming on Xbox 360 from Germany, were pure pressure. Others, like the 2012 Battle.net World Championship in China, were surreal.

“I just remember being in the server room trying to solve this issue, and then [former NBA basketball player] Yao Ming comes in, and everyone’s like, ‘Yao Ming really wants to see production right now!’?” says Ignacio. “I was like, ‘Oh cool, I’m just trying to do my work’ while being a crazy twenty-one-year-old wearing a bunch of StarCraft swag and trying to fix crazy things.”

Even though Twitch had made strides in low-latency video tech, livestreaming remained&&&8212;as in Graham’s mid-2000s Global Gaming League days&&&8212;expensive. At first, Twitch had to pay another company called Akamai to handle especially large viewership spikes and avoid overloading its own servers.

“Whenever there was a major event, we’d call Akamai and tell them, ‘Hey, we’re thinking we’re gonna get, like, thirty thousand viewers for this, so let’s pay you some money and get this set up.’ But if it broke, like, eighty thousand [viewers], we’d have to pay a much higher cost for it,” says Ignacio. “We’d have to forecast esports events so we wouldn’t die from the cost of [overflow]. I had one of the keys for that. So did [CEO] Emmett Shear. I liked using the nuclear missile analogy when it came to that, like ‘OK well, there goes however much money that was.’ We had a giant red thermometer of ‘Here’s how much money was being lost, and we need to make this money up somehow.’?”

Lin, perhaps because he had no other option, came to view even these moments through an optimistic lens.

“We had so many failure points, whether it was at ingest or on our systems,” he says. “It was constant, constant breaking. But it was also a great signal of how much people wanted us to exist. They would suffer through all these pain points that were out of anyone’s control in many cases.”

Graham always maintained hope that Twitch would eventually stop bleeding green.

“[Twitch’s founders] were thinking about ‘What does our infrastructure need to look like in three to five years in order for us to be a sustainable business?’?” he says. “They were spending money like a startup, but in my opinion they were hyper-focused on the two things that were going to determine their success: creators and infrastructure.”

IN THE BEGINNING, Twitch didn’t have many ironclad rules, at least compared to today’s time-honed terms of service that outline who stays and who goes when it comes to granular forms of racism, sexism, harassment, and numerous other varieties of inappropriate conduct. Of the few rules in place back in 2011, one towered above all the rest: Video games only. No non-gaming streams allowed. Those, upon detection, would be banished to Justin.tv, forced to roam the wastes with 24/7 livestreams, truck driving streams, farm streams, and whatever else people could think of to broadcast that wasn’t gaming.

“Anytime we found anyone, any content, even if it was a talking head show,” says Lin, “we would message them and say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this here. You have to go to Justin.tv. Twitch is really about video games.’?”

As far as standard-setting edicts go, it was a pretty simple one&&&8212;at least, on the surface.

“We felt like it was pretty obvious: The majority of the screen real estate should be a video game,” says Lin. “You can place yourself in the corner or whatever. That was totally fine for a while, but of course our community loves to push the envelope. So eventually, people would just put a tiny little corner of video game, to test the line.”

Once early streamers started getting in trouble for that, they flipped the dynamic on its head, giving games center stage but broadcasting even more audacious main events down in the corner of the screen.

“You have the camera where all the [actual] content would happen in the lower third,” says Ignacio. “So they’re ‘playing’ World of Warcraft, but… they’re having a crazy party or doing a dating game or something over Skype.”

This taught Lin, Graham, Goldhaber, Ignacio, and numerous others a lesson that seems obvious in hindsight, but that flew in the face of conventional wisdom at the time: Livestreaming is powered by personalities. Everything else&&&8212;even God-tier video game skill&&&8212;plays second fiddle. It was the beginning of a seismic shift that would ultimately send shock waves to every corner of the internet. Now there’s a personality for everything, whether it’s politics or detecting scam artists. Younger people, in fact, primarily get their news from creators rather than traditional sources. Twitch learned early the power of a friendly face.

“While a lot of the impression at the time was that people wanted to watch who are skilled [gamers], it really is about personality,” says Lin. “Esports was just starting to be understood by the industry and consumers, and so we had this concept that it was all about skilled play, when the reality is, people were watching for the streamer, the personality…. You don’t have to be that good. It helps if you can do both.”

But even though Justin.tv would seem a more natural fit for streams that emphasized personality above all else, Twitch’s focus on gaming provided glue for an otherwise formless medium. Games&&&8212;often lengthy, or in the case of competitive hits like StarCraft and League of Legends, potentially endless&&&8212;gave streamers something to react to, to talk about, every day. Consistency allowed viewers to form habits and build schedules around their favorite creators. They could expect streamers to show up with a daily dose of comfort food, as opposed to the dissonant blend of gimmicks and stunts that had come to characterize other livestreaming services. Technology provided the dance beat, but gaming taught everybody the steps.

“No one knew what their script was going to be if they were just going to sit in front of the camera and talk all day,” says Graham. “You did have guys like [Justin.tv streamer] Marijuana Man where literally he smoked marijuana and then would talk and listen to music, and that’s why some people showed up. But it really came down to: Were you building community around your content? And the gamers were building a community.”

Community led to a consistent audience, and it did not take long for prospective streamers to realize that Twitch was where the viewers were. Twitch cemented this community dynamic by working in collaboration with Plott&&&8212;one of the most popular streamers on the platform at the time&&&8212;to create a button that allowed viewers to subscribe to their favorite streamers for $4.99 per month, granting perks like exclusive chat emotes. Subscriptions became badges of honor to viewers, a sign of commitment, bolstering group cohesion and boosting streamers’ (and Twitch’s) revenue. Twitch’s user base, meanwhile, grew and grew, from 3.2 million in 2011, to 20 million in 2012, to 55 million in 2014. It did not take long for Justin.tv’s founders to realize which arm of their operation was buttering their bread: In 2014, Justin.tv and Twitch’s parent company rebranded to Twitch Interactive, and it shut down the Justin.tv website to focus on Twitch.

Still, it was, to some extent, that first Garden of Eden-like moment that came to define Twitch’s culture: A single rule decreed from on high, almost immediately defied. Twitch streamers would spend the following years trying to skirt the outer edges of rules and norms, while Twitch would try to define what rules and norms even were. Some of this outside-the-box thinking led to pioneering innovations: While early stars like Plott were by-products of the esports world, others like Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell and Saqib “Lirik” Zahid ascended to new levels of stardom by playing a variety of different games&&&8212;rather than esports standards like StarCraft and League&&&8212;and anchoring broadcasts with affable personalities. Those streamers, more so than Twitch, also set the bar for what was an advisable amount of time to spend streaming. They set it high.

“[Zahid], back in the day, was one of the first streamers who was ever just like, ‘I’m streaming eight to ten hours a day,’?” says Goldhaber. “That’s part of why he blew up. That became the meta of how you grow an audience on Twitch.”

Upping time spent streaming conferred a multitude of benefits. Twitch spent much of its lifetime structured as a series of categories organized by number of viewers, and the more hours a streamer spent in a category, the more chances they had to scrape viewers from the underbellies of bigger names who are logging off for the day. Moreover, there was the spectacle of it all: Lengthy streams represented a sort of endurance feat, whether they came in the form of a single marathon broadcast that lasted for twenty-four-plus hours or multiple broadcasts that lasted ten-plus hours, perhaps every day, indefinitely. Viewers came to revere that level of dedication, as they did with YouTubers who’d post multiple videos per week, or even per day. Eventually, they started to rely on it. At that point, for streamers, there was no turning back.

Nowadays, burnout is a major topic of discussion among top streamers, and it’s natural to wonder if early Twitch employees thought to pump the brakes and encourage, well, breaks. At the time, however, most weren’t thinking of what the Twitch landscape might look like in a decade.

“At the time it was so novel, the idea of playing video games for money or for a living,” says Goldhaber. “It’s easy to take for granted, but the concept of [a] creator&&&8212;someone who makes their entire full-time living on the internet&&&8212;barely existed at the time. So I can’t recall a lot of conversations where [burnout] was a big concern. I think it was mostly elation that people were making a full-time career doing what they loved, and we were facilitating that.”

Twitch’s own work culture was also not the healthiest, which might have contributed to that particular blind spot. As with many startups, passion could turn into toxic work habits.

“I had no concept of work-life balance,” says Ignacio of his early days at Twitch. “Grind culture was the meme of the era.”

But while Twitch might not have contemplated the long-term impacts of streamer labor at the time, those norms, once solidified, certainly informed the company’s future thinking; it’s not uncommon for modern-day Twitch contracts to demand upward of 150 or 200 hours per month of live time from big-name creators.

Other creator-born innovations were more straightforwardly beneficial to both the creators and the company. In 2014, a channel called Twitch Plays Pokemon moved beyond the idea of a streamer entirely, allowing thousands of viewers to simultaneously input commands into chat to collectively&&&8212;and chaotically&&&8212;pilot a player character through the 1998 Game Boy hit Pokemon Red. The concept went viral, with millions ultimately tuning in and creating memes based on the broadcast’s most absurd triumphs and failures. Twitch staff came to view it as a watershed moment, one that&&&8212;thanks to the resulting news coverage&&&8212;showed mainstream media that Twitch had bottled millions of Pikachus’ worth of lightning. Its community was doing the unthinkable, in large part because nobody had ever thought of anything like this before. Twitch users were dreaming up entirely new forms of entertainment.

“I think [Twitch Plays Pokemon] completely changed the way people looked at Twitch,” says Graham. “They finally went, ‘Oh shit this whole interactive format and medium is the future. It will define this industry for a long time to come.’?”

Other early streamers, like Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, innovated by pairing gaming prowess with offensive language and shock humor, echoing back to edgy pockets of early YouTube and forward to the perpetual drama engines that power large portions of Twitch today. Bonnell has since been indefinitely banned from Twitch for “hateful conduct,” according to Twitch, but other streamers of the era prone to harboring questionable beliefs or casually employing inadvisable language&&&8212;Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris, Jaryd “Summit1g” Lazar, and Zack “Asmongold” (who has not disclosed his last name) among them&&&8212;are now about as popular as they’ve ever been.

Following in this grand tradition, every era of Twitch has had its crop of edgelords, some of whom took things too far, others of whom are still around today. In 2016, Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp began a reign of bellowing, profanity-laden toxicity that got him banned from his game of choice, League of Legends, for two years. In 2017, Paul “Ice Poseidon” Denino became famous for repeatedly courting real-life controversy until somebody swatted him on an airplane, at which point Twitch banned him. In 2023, Adin Ross&&&8212;who’d already committed countless other infractions&&&8212;finally got the boot after moving to another platform entirely and allowing antisemitism in his chat. F&&&233;lix “xQc” Lengyel, once Twitch’s biggest North American star and still a top streamer, has been suspended for everything from porn to airing copyrighted content to cheating in a Twitch-hosted tournament. The list goes on, as it does on other platforms, each of which have adopted their own content moderation policies over the years&&&8212;some, like YouTube, gradually clamping down, while others, like Twitter (now X), have come to allow all manner of toxicity, even as advertisers have fled. Despite Twitch’s wholesome modern-day marketing, it was founded on edgelords.

“It was the Wild West,” says Graham of livestreaming’s earliest days. “People think there’s edgelords now&&&8212;there are&&&8212;but everyone was an edgelord back in the beginning.”

Graham, to some degree, counts himself as part of that lineage. As an example, he points to a 2007 pre-Twitch stream in which he hosted an event called “Strip Halo,” which pitted adult actresses Mia and Ava Rose against viewers of Graham’s show in games of the popular sci-fi first-person shooter, and if viewers won, the Rose sisters had to remove articles of clothing. This was near the peak of the era in which video games were considered a male pastime, at least as far as marketers and gatekeeping subsets of the fandom were concerned. Graham feels like he contributed to a status quo of objectifying women, one that informed the Twitch community’s future hostility toward female streamers.

“Some of us were like, ‘We can all be Howard Sterns on the internet,’?” says Graham. “I’m not overly proud of all that.”

Early Twitch was characterized by a male-dominated culture among streamers and their communities, as well as in the halls of Twitch’s offices.

“We did attract a certain kind of bro-y gamer guy,” says Goldhaber. “The majority of the partnerships team was a bro-y gamer guy [type]. A lot of bro-y gamer guys.”

Partnerships, the team on which Graham spent his first several years at Twitch, were instrumental in Twitch’s early success. At the time, Twitch hand-selected which streamers achieved partner status, granting them additional moneymaking features on the site, a direct line of communication into Twitch, and the ability to attend exclusive parties. This gave Twitch’s partnership team outsized influence and led to accusations of favoritism, especially where moderation&&&8212;what happened when streamers broke the rules&&&8212;was concerned.

“There was such a lack of structure,” says Graham. “On one hand, that was great for creators, because as partnerships [team members], we want to look out for other partners…. But [partners] really only got banned for the most egregious shit.”

“In the early days, everyone did everything,” says Goldhaber. “We all kind of tapped in for moderation. I don’t think we had a lot of consistency.”

While Twitch standardized its moderation practices more over the years and eventually put together a dedicated trust and safety team, Graham believes that too few people doing too much work led to a reactionary moderation approach rather than a proactive one.

“A lot of [moderation] was ‘Just let it keep going until we really need to change it.’ It was forced reaction. ‘This happened, now we need to do something about it.’… Did the [rules] evolve gracefully over time? No. Did support evolve gracefully over time? No.”

These growing pains left scars. Racism and sexism&&&8212;never explicitly allowed on Twitch, but addressed slowly by staff (or not at all) in the platform’s early days&&&8212;were able to snarl their roots around the bases of many communities. Long-standing issues sprouted from this tainted soil: regular harassment of female streamers both on Twitch and off, by streamers and viewers, as well as the practice of spamming chat with an emote of a Black streamer named Mychal “Trihex” Jefferson anytime a Black person appeared on-screen, sometimes as a dog whistle for slurs. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of old-school Twitch toxicity, and though the company has worked hard to curtail those issues with significantly better enforcement of its own rules and built-in moderation tools streamers can deploy at will, the platform will never be able to fully erase the stain on its culture.

“If you’ve seen [Netflix mystery movie] Glass Onion, one of the main characters is a Twitch streamer, and he’s an awful fucking human being,” says Cristina Amaya, a former customer service rep at Twitch who went on to become a director at esports event company DreamHack. “That’s the joke, right? All these awful people are representative. That’s what people think of our platform.”

This insufficient approach to self-moderation and self-regulation also revealed the downsides of Twitch’s cross-pollination within its own community. Twitch employees regularly mixed and mingled with streamers, who they regarded as peers despite a power imbalance in which employees could grant streamers status both socially and&&&8212;when it came to site features&&&8212;at the press of a button.

“Not to downplay it or say it’s acceptable, but first of all, everyone’s in their early to mid-twenties drinking a lot at conventions,” says Goldhaber. “Twitch employees and streamers were all partying together, and they were all young…. So yeah, [streamers and employees getting together] definitely happened. That kind of thing was not all that surprising.”

“There was a bit of a bro-y culture,” Goldhaber reiterates. “There was a lot of drinking culture.”

In a few cases, these dynamics led to unsavory outcomes, though they would not come to light until much later. In 2020, a streamer who went by the handle Vio accused Hassan Bokhari, then accounts director of strategic partnerships at Twitch, of abuse of power and sexual assault that took place both before and after the two began dating in 2015. She said Bokhari would use his status as a Twitch employee&&&8212;one with special access to Twitch partners&&&8212;to lavish her with perks like a username change, a special holiday package meant for Twitch partners (she was not one at the time), and eventually partnership. When the two met up in person at a 2015 video game convention, Vio said Bokhari immediately began pressuring her with unwanted sexual advances. This turned into a pattern across multiple in-person encounters, until she, in her own words, “gave in.”

“I was preyed on, manipulated, gaslighted, violated, and sexually assaulted,” Vio wrote in a 2020 post about her experiences with Bokhari.

According to a report by Kotaku, this led Twitch to hire an external investigator and ultimately dismiss Bokhari from his role.

A wave of similar stories came out around the same time as part of a