3 Things We Learned from the TwitchCon Panels

So wait, what do you do for a living?

By IGN STUDIOS

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It’s almost impossible not to talk about streams without mentioning the money involved. With top streamers taking home millions from sponsors, fans, and Twitch revenue sharing, streaming is big business these days and it’s only going to get bigger in the future.

So while monetization was expected to come up as a talking point at TwitchCon 2017, a convention based almost entirely around streaming, the panels from the convention also gave everyone — streamers, Twitch employees, and eSports orgs alike — a rare opportunity to speak candidly about everything else it takes to make money. Here are a few highlights from this weekend’s panels:

Putting Automation to Work at Twitch

Chat is one of Twitch’s biggest challenges and this panel gave Twitch Admins, Data Scientists, and Engineers a chance to talk openly about this problem and their individual approaches to it.

Two major themes of the panels were:

• Increase transparency to help good users avoid innocent problems
• Help creators by giving them automated troll-fighting tools

Out_of_Toner, a Data Scientist at the company, highlighted the role of automation in addressing these challenges in TwitchChat. One example she mentioned was using A/B testing to improve visibility of channel rules for certain users and treating those rules like a Terms of Service checkbox. Since every channel has its own rules, she found that some viewers were banned from streams not because they were trolls, but because they simply didn’t read the rules. Through highlighting the channel rules, her team saw a dramatic reduction in bans, penalties, and reports — subsequently saving valuable time and resources for users, moderators, creators, and even Twitch administrators. You can watch the full panel here.

Separating Work From Life

Veteran streamers GassyMexican, GoldGlove, Strippin, and Dooger hosted a talk about how to achieve stream-life balance. While there were plenty of funny stories about the rush of success and the thrill from making metrics increase like a high-score, there were plenty of truly personal moments too. The downsides of chasing fame and viewership numbers and the pressure to please their fans are often less talked about, so it was refreshing to see this group pour over not only the problem, but also its solution.

It all comes down to the need to separate “work” from “life”. Since streaming is often done out of the home, and at odd times for hours on end, this combination can easily lead to feeling the creator’s entire life consists of nothing but streaming. So it’s especially important to deliberately put effort in separating the two apart, ranging from setting official work hours to coordinating with streamers on similar schedules, to getting shared office space to physically separate home and work. Some even suggested changing cities to find support networks. Lastly, the most important thing is to make sure streamers prioritize seeing and socializing people in real life.

You can see the full panel here.

Tempo Storm on eSports and Professional Gaming

Money in eSports is a tricky subject. On the one hand, the idea of winning multimillion-dollar tournament prizes and being followed by legions of a fans is a tempting proposition. But on the other hand, there’s a legitimate question of how much each pro is worth and if team owners adequately value players.

Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk, Owner of Tempo Storm
Source: Tempo Storm

Take Reynad, Tempo Storm’s owner, for example. Tempo Storm has more than 40 players and streamers competing globally in everything from FIFA to Hearthstone. They’ve even got a pro speedrunner, Trihex, who was on the panel. In this panel, Reynad and his co-panelists detailed what “worth” and “value” can mean on the business side of things, going over everything from why players of popular game titles attract bigger salaries to why eSports companies absolutely need good players on less profitable titles in order to earn “street cred.” But the real take away was Reynad’s approach in separating compensation (money) from value (intrinsic good). You can view the full panel here.

TwitchCon 2017 provided a rare glimpse into the business side of streaming, at a time when streaming and eSports are becoming more mainstream. If you saw something new or learned something surprising at TwitchCon 2017, post it in the comments below!

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