Will new Twitch rules affect Giant Bomb?

I have heard there have changes to Twitch rules and regs, but I know nothing about them. Does anyone know how this will affect Giant Bomb since everything seems to be going through Twitch these days?

I think right now the answer is "It depends.".

As a quick summary of what the new rule changes are, when first announced Twitch's new rules were trying to limit the ability of streamers do non-Twitch associated advertising on their own streams by preventing them from having on-stream ad overlays above a certain size, playing pre-made advertisement videos during their stream, and that kind of thing (basically a company will pay a streamer to put up a banner, play an ad video, or push a promotional code for buying something or using a service. This is highly lucrative for some streamers). This type of advertising has become commonplace on Twitch for years now and while it was technically in their rules to not do some of this, it was never enforced and was at times actively encouraged by Twitch themselves.

However, Twitch has already started backing out of this whole thing and seem to be walking back big parts of their rule change. The backlash from streamers and viewers has been substantial for a number of reasons. Firstly, Twitch's own advertising barely pays the average streamer any money and their ad "bounty" program (which enables streamers to do a Twitch-sanctioned in-stream advertisement for a business. Basically they pay you money to play a trailer or look at a website on your stream for a certain amount of time) doesn't pay nearly as well as these outside deals. Many streamers rely on this outside ad income as part of their way to stay afloat as Twitch streamers. Secondly, Twitch recently revised/lowered the percentage of money streamers receive from Twitch subs, which hurt the income of many streamers already. Third, as was mentioned before, Twitch never indicated to streamers that these forms of advertising were unacceptable so it blindsided many streamers when the rule change announcement was made. This is the third or fourth time in the last year or two that Twitch has announced a sudden rule change like this and streamers were already starting to get increasingly frustrated with the platform. The rules changes have seemed increasingly out of touch with how the platform works and have reeked of Amazon trying to squeeze more money out of Twitch at the expense of the people who actually provide the content for the platform.

Now onto how this affects Giant Bomb. Most Giant Bomb streams aren't really affected by the new rules since most streams don't contain this type of advertising and when they do at most they usually have a promo code in an overlay, which can be easily adjusted to fit within the new rules (An example of this is when GB advertised that company that sold fancy cards on UPF). The one exception for regularly scheduled GB content is, of course, the Bombcast stream. The pre-recorded ads that are played during breaks are technically in violation of the new rules. One other exception that's a much bigger thing than just GB is talkover streams like the ones yesterday for the Summer Game Fest. It's not clear if those fall under the new rules since there is outside pre-roll video advertising in them. Is anyone restreaming that in violation of the new rules?

But here's the thing I've been wondering. How would Twitch enforce this rule on the Bombcast's ads at all? GB's way of doing ads is very different from what these rules are going after. GB don't have preroll video playing for their ads and the overlay Jan uses is just a standard one that fits thematically with the rest of the Bombcast's overlays (Jan could just change the text on the ad overlay to say "Break" then in smaller text put the advertiser name somewhere. This would technically not break the new rule about ad overlays). Not only that, but Jan creates and reads all the ads himself, which doesn't seem covered as part of the new ruleset. The new rules are seemingly about using pre-prepared ads provided by the company advertising. GB's podcast ads aren't that. Twitch also explicitly said that it's fine for streamers to push promo codes, which is largely what GB's advertisements do. It would be pretty tough for Twitch to argue that pre-recorded Jan telling you to check out a promo code for a company is any different from live Jan telling you to do the same thing. Worst comes to worst, someone on the podcast could just do a live read of their ad script instead of pre-recording themselves saying it and it would be acceptable within the new rules.

If it hasn't become clear yet, these new Twitch rules are a mess. There's a bunch of edge cases Twitch don't have answers for and the number of grey areas they left open make it seem like these new rules were put in place by some c-suite who is completely clueless as to how Twitch actually works. If past enforcement of new policy is anything to go by, Twitch probably won't actually enforce any of these new rules anyway since it risks scaring away their biggest revenue sources. It's really dumb.

They have backpedaled on this. First by mentioning that merely the messaging was poor (eventhough they clearly put work in it with clear text peppered with images to showcase what would and not be allowed under the new rules). This was not some sort of translated leak that was taken out of context or something.

Then they realized that the whole idea was wholeheartedly rejected by the public, so they went with 'These new changes are bad for you and bad for Twitch' as if they were just shooting the shit, instead of preparing this move for months. If there was any truth to them seeing this as being 'bad for Twitch' the idea would've been shut down before it saw the light of day. If it's so obviously bad for the company, yet reached this stage, clearly the champions of this policy change should step down from their roles. Imagine what other decisions they might make that will be so obviously bad for the company in the future! Right Twitch?

I guess they sort of hoped the viewers would be like 'Yeah.. you go Twitch.. i'm so sick of all these ads on screen! Get rid of them! Mandatory Twitch ads is all the ads i want to see! If i pay to evade the ads, i don't want to see any advertisements on screen through baked in ads neither!'

The problem for Twitch seems to be that viewers tend to have a close relationship with their fav creators and want them to actually be able to make a living from it. By introducing a policy that's bad for creators, those creators spread that sentiment towards their viewers.

@ben_h: Thanks for the good summary.

@ben_h: Great summary