The controversy and general community disappointment withTwitchfor its Partner Plus program can be felt all across the Internet, with what seems to be an overwhelming vocal majority of streamers upset with the platform’s leaders' stringent quotas and qualifications for even making it into the program, and the miniscule number of current partners who are expected to become eligible for the upgrade when it arrives in October.
If you’re not fully caught up on the situation, Twitch currently allows streamers to qualify for Partner status, which allows them to keep 50% of the revenue generated by their channels, while Twitch takes the remaining half. There are already plenty of requirements to become a partner, including having at least 50 followers and 500 minutes of content broadcast in the past 30 days. Following community concerns that a 50/50 split was unfair to creators, Twitch unveiled plans for an enhanced Partner Plus program, which would instead allow creators to keep 70% of their channels' revenue, but with extra restrictions.
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Another Twitch partner,TragicOnTwitch, has taken things a step further, setting upa UserVoice petitionto help petition for the elimination of the gifted subs' exclusion. Her poll also offers some potential alternatives Twitch could take for Partner Plus qualifications, such as letting in anyone who maintains at least 500 gifted subscriptions. “Encouraging gift subs is essential to the success of creators and the platform,” she told us. “Discouraging them at this time is invalidating a large source of revenue for most streamers. As a full-time streamer myself, gift subs truly are my largest source of revenue.”
While that seems to be the popular opinion — Tragic’s petition currently sits at more than 1,200 votes, which she notes is more people thansome estimates saywill qualify for Partner Plus — not everyone we spoke to was outright against the gifted subs not counting toward the minimum required for the 70/30 split.McQueeb, who currently has around 100 paid subscriptions and an all-time high of around 2,100 total subscriptions, brought up claims that the exclusion of gifted subs was a move by Twitch to thwart money laundering and fraud attempts by its users. “Not only that, but you could literally buy your way in to the program, although this would be against Twitch terms of service,” he noted. “From those examples, it’s easy to see why Twitch made the decision.”
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On the higher end of the Partner Plus spectrum, payouts will be capped a 100,000 per year. That’s a number that won’t affect any of the streamers we spoke with, but it has had its repercussions. Asreported by The New York Times, popular streamer Felix Lengyel, better known as xQc, recently signed a two-year, $100 million contract with Twitch rival Kick to stream content on their platform. And while there’s no exclusivity clause preventing him from continuing to use Twitch, that kind of payout is something most Hollywood actors and professional athletes can only dream about, showcasing the lengths to which Kick is willing to go to attract talent.
Something that may be disheartening to streamers who are struggling to reach and maintain the desired 350 paid subscriptions required for Partner Plus is that one Streamer with whom we spoke, who wished to remain anonymous, told us he is already receiving a 70/30 split of the profits, a claim that hasbeen publicly corroboratedby some other members of the streaming community. And while the popular estimate going around is that only about 2.5 percent of partners — comprising fewer than 1,100 people — will qualify for Partner Plus, our anonymous respondent took it a step further, claiming fewer than 1% of Twitch streamers will make the cut, “And that’s out of millions.”
So what does this all mean for the streaming community moving forward, and what would streamers like to see done instead? Poffle is in favor of the 70/30 split going to every partner who streams on Twitch, not just Partner Plus members, saying “it does take a lot of effort and hard work to get there and honestly partner benefits have dwindled lately.” She believes the fallout could lead more and more streamers to choose other platforms, like YouTube and Kick, and that Twitch “will be left kicking themselves of why didn’t they just do 70/30 for all partners.”
McQueeb told us he probably won’t be chasing after Partner Plus membership, as he simply doesn’t believe he can shore up those numbers, though if he were closer to the goal, he might be more inclined to make a push for more paid subscriptions to his channel. “Pushing to meet, and maintain 350 direct subs is a tall order,” he told us. “In the handful of years I’ve been streaming, I doubt I’ve ever met 350. The most subscriptions I’ve had is approximately 2100 from memory.”
(DualShockers Managing Editor Sam Woods contributed to this article.)
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