Over 2 Million Twitch Points Used: A Use Case

3 Days, 44 Artists, 1 Crazy Virtual Camp Experience

When we were approached by the Artichokes are Yellow Label with the opportunity to liven up a 3 day stream on the Dirtybird twitch channel, we knew we couldn't say no. The concept was simple enough, a virtual world where we could stream in artists live with triggered interactions for over 36 hours. We had run this setup plenty of times, but we were convinced that people would get bored if it was the same stage for 3 days straight. This was the start to building a virtual experience that would span 3 environments, 3 stages, and a close team-based competition.

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A team full of vegetables

We knew that the Dirtybird community has had a long history with team based rivalries and we wanted create something that the Artichokes are Yellow community could grab on to. After much deliberation on how not to lessen either parties brands, we had decided on 3 vegetable based teams - Artichokes are Yellow, Radishes are Green, and Carrots are Blue. The game was simple, during the 3 day stream we allowed viewers to spend twitch points to trigger interactions that would support each one of the teams in the virtual world. We had 3 variations of fireworks, pyrotechnics, confetti, and glowsticks that would be colored based on the team you wished to support.

"I know we decided on vegetables, but are fruits on the table?"

How it worked

Teams worked to raise their flag to the top of the flagpole by redeeming interactions. Once a teams flag hit the top, vegetables from the winning team would rain down onto the stage and the flags would be reset to start the race again. Each interaction redemption would award 50 points to their respective team, and that score was displayed on a scoreboard for the entirety of the event. As cool as it was seeing you teams flag hit the top was, it became obvious that getting your teams overall score as high as you could was what really mattered.

The reception

Very quickly, an interaction we weren't sure how was going to perform, became a super heated rivalry between the entire community. Each of our artists chose a team to rep and when they called out for the audience to show their support, viewers came out to supercharged their teams score with interactions. As the end of the first day came to a close, viewers had consumed over 500k twitch points supporting their team and ended with Radishes are Green winning by a small margin. Over the next two days, we saw an even crazier amount of support for each team with a cumulative 2 million channel points spent, totaling to over 50,000 individual interactions.

Limitations and learnings

Although one of our most successful events, there were some glaring issues with relying on a platform like Twitch when tooling business model. While Twitch points are very easy to understand and use, every use would make an announcement in the chat that would end up spamming out any hope of having a conversati on. And then donations and spending Twitch bits through chat commands, from a user experience perspective, is very difficult for new users to understand. This led us quickly to the conclusion that we would have to start designing and building our own platform to achieve the experience that we wanted. You can see more about our platform here.

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