Twitch announces big changes to Hype Chat following negative feedback
Unsplash: Caspar Camille RubinTwitch has announced it will be rolling out some big changes to Hype Chat this month following less-than-positive feedback from the community.
American live-streaming platform Twitch is making some big changes to Hype Chat, a feature that allows viewers to pin a message to the top of a chat for a price.
How much viewers pay determines how long the message is pinned for as well as its character limit.
However, while the idea behind Hype Chat is to help supporters stand out and be recognized by their favorite streamers, community feedback indicates the feature is failing to deliver — and Twitch is taking note.
Taking to Twitter, the official Twitch Support account announced the platform would be making changes to improve user experience.
“Based on the community’s feedback, we’ve decided to deprecate Hype Chat on November 15th and invest more into Cheering and Bits, going forward,” the account posted. “We still believe in the value of pinned messages in fast-moving chats; viewers will be able to pin Cheers with Bits in the coming weeks.”
This means that from November 15, Hype Chat will no longer be supported on Twitch. Moving forward, viewers will instead be able to pin their Cheers with Bits.
More information on the expected changes will be released during Twitch’s monthly live product update show, Patch Notes, which will commence on November 15th at 12:00 PM PT.
Users of the platform quickly jumped to Twitter to share their excitement, supporting Twitch’s decision to change focus and move away from Hype Chat; “Continue listening and working with the community. This [is] a step forward.”
CookSux, a popular Twitch streamer, also responded to the news, writing, “We all saw this coming, but props for admitting it was a huge waste of resources.”
