Twitch’s vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro has stressed that the service’s biggest goal on the horizon is its ongoing support of the console space.
In an interview with CVG, DiPietro began, “The biggest thing on the horizon is the expansion of Twitch into the console space, generally. From both a broadcasting perspective and from a viewership perspective. And hopefully console games will continue their rise as a big piece of the ecosystem as well… When we launched, the genesis of Twitch was very PC-gamer centric. eSports was a big part of the genesis of Twitch, League of Legends, Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft, Dota 2, those kinds of games.
“We’ve only just begun the next-generation console era. It’s in its real infant stages. The PS4 launched, what, two months ago with some broadcasting functionality baked into it. We’re seeing those numbers are astonishing, about 20 percent of our broadcaster base already, just in the last two months, is on PS4. The retention with those users is off the charts, people are really flocking to it. The console gamers are so far flocking to it in that early part of the availability of next-gen consoles.
“And then when Xbox One comes out, that’s gonna be really exciting too. The two consoles together with Twitch functionality could really be a true game changer for us in the future.”
DiPietro added that new Twitch SDK functions could see the service offer new incentives and features, such as using meta-data to create a show-reel of all your boss battles from a particular game, to offering you Twitch-exclusive character skins once you’ve broadcast a game for a set number of hours.
“Those are things that you can’t quite do at the platform level,” he continued, “but you can do, potentially, at the game level, at the software level. So that’s real next-generation stuff, we’ll see what happens with that, but it’s definitely an exciting possibility.
“…Oh, and mobile is a very interesting thing. The ability to broadcast from mobile platforms is sort of a next-generation broadcasting technology that we’re working on right now, which also has the potential to change, fundamentally, the business. Simply because mobile gaming is nearly ubiquitous, at least in the US. So that’ll be an exciting thing, to see how that fits into the ecosystem.”