Back in the day, Twitch ensured that the best creators were streaming on its platform by offering them lucrative exclusivity deals. In 2020 alone, the platform got the likes of Dr DisRespect, Summit1g, dakotaz, and JoshOG to sign on the dotted line, preventing them from defecting to other platforms like YouTube.
However, five years later, things couldn’t be more different. Towards the end of 2024, a Wall Street Journal report claimed that the site was actually losing money. Since then, it’s fair to say that a big goal of Twitch’s is to become profitable. According to platform CEO Dan Clancey, Twitch is making strides in this direction, leaving it in a “strong position” financially. And the thing he credits most for this is his platform’s pivot away from profitability.
Moving Away From Unsustainable Twitch Contracts
“If you go back in time, we made decisions that weren’t the right way to think about our business in terms of the long-term sustainability of the business, so I feel good where we’re at now in terms of our structure for streamer compensation,” he said in an interview with The Game Business Live. “We have pulled back from this idea of paying top streamers more than what they make on Twitch in this competitive tit-for-tat, where we were creating kind of non-sustainable contracts.”
“So, we’ve made a number of changes and we feel very good that we’re now in a very good place,” he added. “Oh, and also Prime, which is a very important part of Twitch, we got that into a structure that is sustainable. We feel like we’re in a very strong place and I like how our business structure works.”
While Twitch seems to have given up on streaming deals for good, other platforms like Kick are still on that train, with xQc recently signing a non-exclusive $100 million deal. However, if this has proven unsustainable for a streamer as large as Twitch, it’s difficult to see how it’s in any way sustainable for Kick, given its a much smaller platform. Either way, with simulcasting becoming more popular ever, it’s clear that exclusive streaming deals will remain in the past.
