Would you want to watch professional gamers play the games that they are best at? Most people wouldn’t be interested in this kind of voyeurism, but the 50 million people that use Twitch are more than interested in doing just that - watching gamers play. Amazon has just purchased Twitch for a cool $1 billion too, so there’s definitely something to Twitch that many are missing.

What Twitch Does

Twitch lets gamers film themselves playing various popular video games via live stream. That stream is then shared with the millions of people that use Twitch. Granted, this is a very small and targeted market - mostly competitive gamers - but seeing how a champ plays a game like Dota 2 could mean picking up some important moves.

The other advantage to seeing how competitive gamers play is that Twitch allows competitors to study the competition - much like an NFL team would study the movements of another team. But, why would Amazon want to spend so much money on a company like Twitch?

Amazon’s Investment

Amazon has recently started a division called Amazon Game Studios. Amazon’s Game Studios solely makes video games for Fire tablets. Aligning with the Twitch team would mean having a broader audience for various Fire games down the line. There’s another reason why Amazon wants Twitch too - advertising.

Amazon can now advertise to millions of Twitch viewers, and that’s big money for the company. Amazon is looking to compete with Google head-on by purchasing Twitch, since all the ads currently running on Twitch are Google ads, but this won’t be the case for long. According to various resources, Google was actually going to purchase Twitch, but the company pulled out of that race citing something to do with security issues (though some rumours point to the fact that Google couldn’t own Twitch and YouTube due to monopolization issues).

Some Changes

For the most part, Twitch will stay intact, though Amazon will be making some changes to the ad structure and to other parts of the service. The team, format, and other details won’t change. Buying Twitch certainly gives Amazon a strong foothold when it comes to getting in front of online gamers - Google already has YouTube, which is also a popular arena for competitive gaming videos, and now Amazon will have Twitch, which is the second most popular way of checking out gaming video details.

If you do use Twitch currently, you have nothing to really worry about. The ads that Google once ran on the site are now going to be replaced by Amazon ads, but most people won’t notice the difference. As stated, Amazon doesn’t plan to change Twitch around too much, so most of what you already know and love will remain as is. If you haven’t checked out Twitch yet, you can do so by visiting the company’s site - only, now the young startup is owned by Amazon, which payed off well for Twitch developers to say the least.