Twitch announces major subscription cost changes with local pricing

Twitch has revealed some huge new changes coming to the cost of subscriptions around the globe to better reflect the cost of living in those countries while still giving viewers a chance to support their favorite creators.

On May 17, Twitch announced “Local Subscription Pricing” would be launching on May 20 with Mexico and Turkey being the first countries to see a significant change to how subscriptions are priced.

This will then be followed by “most countries” in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa and more starting in Q3 2021.

Some notable countries of interest include the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Ireland and Brazil. The full list can be found here.

According to Twitch, this decision has been in the works for some time with the Amazon-owned company finally deciding to pull the trigger on it recently.

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When you dig into the numbers, it’s easy to see why. As Twitch explained in their blog post, “The percentage of active users in Europe or Asia who support creators with a subscription is roughly 50% lower relative to North America. In Latin America, it’s nearly 80% lower.”

Plus, when testing these changes the results spoke for themselves. “We conducted several price tests and saw that lower sub prices boosted overall monthly subs and sub revenue for creators,” Twitch said. “In one recent test in Brazil, lower sub prices more than doubled creator revenue and total subscriber count.”

As for how the changes will impact streamers, Twitch is launching a 12-month program to guarantee certain revenue levels will be reached.

“Twitch will cover 100% of baseline channel and Prime sub revenue (if needed) for three calendar months, including the month of the price change,” they explained. After this, incentive payments will be decreased by 25% every three months for the next nine months.

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Furthermore, Twitch will look at how much money a creator has made from subs in the past three months and calculate averages based on how much content was streamed. “As long as that creator streams at least 85% of their live baseline hours in a month and meets certain other eligibility criteria, we’ll pay that creator a ‘revenue adjustment incentive’ to make up for any lost revenue from subs,” the Amazon-owned company added.

This should be a nice change for viewers in countries receiving the price adjustments and hopefully the revamp results in more income overall for streamers across the Twitch.