Twitch Stories feature takes shot at YouTube shorts and TikTok

During TwitchCon Paris’ opening ceremony, it was revealed that Twitch Stories and a Discovery Feed feature would soon be coming to the platform.

Twitch has always been known as a “live only” platform, but not anymore. The long-standing livestreaming site will introduce short-form and more discoverability for offline content to help streamers reach their audience without needing to be live.

Twitch Stories will be comparable to Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok stories, as they will be available to view on the Twitch Mobile app and only last for 24 hours after posting before disappearing. This feature is set to launch in October 2023 and will be covered by the Twitch Community Guidelines.

Discovery Feed feature coming soon to Twitch

Another interesting feature heading to Twitch was announced to be the Discovery Feed, which is similar to YouTube shorts, where users will be able to scroll through a feed of short clips streamers post. This short-form content was created with the idea of helping Twitch Mobile app users find new streamers and content they might enjoy.

And here’s a preview of stories on Twitch ✨ pic.twitter.com/Z2ejsb5nfX

— Twitch (@Twitch) July 8, 2023

Along with all of the new features and changes comes an update to the Clips editor already integrated into the site to improve functionality. The update will bring the editor to mobile devices as well as provide the ability to export clips directly from TikTok to Twitch.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Product Vice President Jeremy Forrester states “We’re not building the Feeds to compete with TikTok, we don’t want to build a platform where people just come and consume the feed for an hour a day.”

Forrester then goes on to say “We want to utilise things like short form content and UX that people are familiar with in order to help streamers grow their live stream community. For us livestream will continue to be the heart of everything that Twitch does.”

Though a lot of these changes appear to be coming to mobile first, the focus appears to still be on the platform’s livestream content at this time.