Twitch is taking a page out of every other social platform’s book: It’s launching a stories feature.
“I know you’re probably already familiar with the concept of stories,” Eduardo Fenili, a senior product manager at Twitch, said in a company blog post announcing the feature. “But by building stories into the Twitch experience, we’ve made it easier for you to reach your community directly on Twitch, through short posts that expire in 48 hours.”
That is one notable difference between Twitch’s stories and other platforms’. In most places, stories only last 24 hours. But it’s clear Twitch wants them to be not quite as ephemeral–maybe because users who come to Twitch generally aren’t there to scroll a home feed the way they would on Twitter or TikTok. They’re there to watch, often for multi-hour periods, streams from specific creators they already know and enjoy. So, they might need a little more time to find the sort of one-off posts they’re familiar seeing on Instagram instead of Twitch (though we should note Twitch is giving stories push notifications–something else that’s different from other platforms. More on that below).
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Why is Twitch adding stories now? It all seems to boil back down to discoverability + audience-building, two key things creators on Twitch have struggled with since the platform began. That’s not because creators aren’t capable of bringing in new people and keeping them; it’s because Twitch has historically not offered on-platform ways for them to do it.
“You’ve built a loyal community on Twitch and your followers likely follow you on other platforms. But we’ve heard from you that trying to connect with them through multiple services limits your reach and can feel rather disconnected from your shared experiences on Twitch,” Fenili said.
As Fenili notes, many Twitch streamers focus on building their audience off Twitch, and then hoping those people follow them to their livestreams. But Twitch has been promising it’ll do better with discoverability, and this feature looks to be part of that effort.
Stories will appear as a shelf at the top of users’ Following pages on the Twitch mobile app. For now, Twitch is limiting stories to partner and affiliate streamers who have streamed at least once in the last 30 days.
It says it’ll consider opening access to more creators “as we test the safety measures we have in place.”
As mentioned above, Twitch has opted to give stories push notifications. “One of the reasons we wanted to bring stories to Twitch is that it makes it possible for you to easily reach out to your Twitch followers,” Fenili said. “If your regularly scheduled stream will be starting 30 minutes late, you can let your community know with a story.”
Users can control how often they get push notifications for stories. When they go to see a story, they’ll be able to react to it with emojis.
On the creator side, streamers will be able to see total reaction and view counts on each story, even after they expire.
One last feature we want to mention: Twitch is giving creators the option to publish subscriber-only stories–making them an on-platform way for creators to offer paywalled bonus content.
Twitch is hosting its annual convention, TwitchCon, this coming weekend, so expect more product announcements soon. It says it plans to add more features “in the coming months.”
