Popular Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday that it will be imposing a 100-hour limit on the archived video highlights users can preserve permanently on the site. And while Twitch says that only 0.5 percent of users will be affected by these new limits, gamers are warning that the move threatens to eradicate large swaths of recent gaming history from the Internet.
Highlights, in Twitch’s own words, are a way for Twitch streamers to “show off your best moments to new viewers who land on your channel page.” Unlike VOD recordings of full Twitch broadcasts—which are deleted automatically after seven days (or 60 days for Twitch partners)—these highlights provide a more permanent way to maintain an archive of important moments for many Twitch streamers.
That seeming permanence is set to end on April 29, though, when Twitch says it will start to delete content from channels with more than 100 hours of highlights, starting with the least-viewed highlights.
Twitch headquarters in San Francisco.
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In announcing the change, Twitch cited the “costly” indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for “less than 0.1% of hours watched” across the site. These highlights “haven’t been very effective in driving discovery or engagement with viewers,” Twitch wrote, and limiting them will “help us manage resources more efficiently… and continue to invest in new features and improvements to more effective viewer engagement tools like Clips and the mobile feed.”
An “incalculable” loss
On social media, though, many Twitch users are expressing outrage over what the loss of these clips will do to the shared history of their gaming communities. “Who the hell cares about discovery or engagement?” one streamer wrote. “People use highlights to archive, and you’re destroying YEARS of speedrunning and other communities’ history.”
The speedrunning community seems particularly likely to be negatively affected by Twitch’s move. As VTuber VanityFox points out, “many speedrunners use highlights to document world records and important moments… the amount gaming history they are deleting to save money and shove short form content on your feed is incalculable.”