Comment Video games are a big topic of conversation on Twitter, generating 2.4 billion tweets last year. At new owner Elon Musk’s Twitter, where senior executives and nearly half the company’s workforce have been purged and where monetization is the priority, gaming still has a place. But the drastic changes facing the company and its more than 200 million daily active users are resonating with the gaming community and industry. In May, Twitter’s global head of gaming partnerships, Rishi Chadha, told The Washington Post: “When people think of gaming, they think of the Twitches of the world, the YouTubes of the world. And it’s like you can’t forget what Twitter is doing. Twitter was the home for conversations and it was quiet there.” Gamers flock to Twitter to talk about their favorite games, create memes, angrily respond to unwanted game changes, and more. Content creators are using the platform to reach their audience, and some are trying to monetize their presence, with varying degrees of success. During major gaming events, regular users and influencers share their live reactions. But all that may change. On November 4, Musk fired about 3,700 Twitter followers workers, almost half the workforce. More employees quit this week, following a sudden mandatory back-to-the-office policy. As part of a cost-cutting drive, Musk laid off employees in marketing, content curation and other departments he said would be less of a priority. Many members of revenue-generating teams, such as partnerships and sales, were retained. The marketing side of Twitter Gaming, which spent company money to make indirect income, was abandoned. Chadha, who oversaw a money-making team, kept his job, he confirmed last Friday. It’s “the end of an era,” said a former Twitter employee with knowledge of how Twitter Gaming operated. “The bird won’t be the same.”
Twitter’s game strategy If you’ve never heard of Twitter Gaming, that’s on purpose, according to the former employee. Part of taking players organically to social media meant not shoving a brand down their throats. Twitter Gaming used a lighter touch – consistently replying to tweets and promoting creators and big events. The initial goals of Twitter Gaming were to make money for Twitter and gaming companies, continue the conversation about gaming, and make video clips, live streams and snapshots more accessible to users, according to Chadha. Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. This approach by Twitter reflects the efforts of tech companies like Apple, Meta, Google and most notably Microsoft (which owns Xbox and is in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard) to get a piece of the pie. Analysis: Call of Duty made $800 million in one weekend. Here’s what that means. While Twitter Gaming was not well known to the company or users, it planned to change that over time. Before Musk took over and took the company private, Twitter published blog posts in January and July highlighting gaming’s presence on its platform. According to Twitter, there were 1.5 billion tweets about gaming in the first half of 2022, compared to 10.4 billion tweets about news. The official Twitter Gaming social media account, created in 2015, has been silent since November 3, a day before the layoffs. It’s unclear who, if anyone, will foot the bill. “We’re still committed to posting content on Twitter (even in turbulent times like these) because of how important it has become to our community.” — Joe Hixson, Riot Games spokesperson The gaming initiative was started by Twitter employees in partnerships and marketing who were gamers themselves. “I’ve been on Twitter now for almost five years, and when I got there, there wasn’t really a gaming strategy,” Chadha said in May. “There were a few deals we had signed for some live rights. But that was really it. And so one of the first things I had to focus on when I started at Twitter was to think, what are we doing? What is our narrative?’ Twitter Gaming employees interacted directly with the gaming communities on the platform. Speaking to The Post, several creators focused on games like “Destiny 2” and “Apex Legends” praised Twitter Gaming’s recently fired social leader Shiraz Siddiqui, who they say helped grow their audience and ensured for them in the challenge. times. “He wasn’t just another employee — he was very well connected to the gaming space and its creators,” said Malik “Crusader” Forrester, Twitch streamer and Apex Legends team manager at esports organization Team Liquid. “He went out [of] its way of helping creators in times like record labels and music groups ruining music streamed on Twitch and Twitter. It helped me personally to use Twitter’s media studio tool to filter all the media I was uploading with music.” YouTuber and “Destiny 2” streamer Ryan “True Vanguard” Wright talked about Siddiqui and the Twitter gaming team’s ability to make connections, recalling a time when they spotted a small upcoming “Destiny 2” creator saying DFlawless on Twitter , recognized the potential and quickly put him in touch with developer Bungie. Almost overnight, DFlawless was working directly with the studio to push new in-game content to thousands of people. “It’s things like this — creating catalytic moments for creators and developers — that we’re really going to miss now with [Siddiqui] and that team out of the picture,” Wright said. “As an influencer who got the biggest boost in viewership from a catalytic moment like this, I really feel like this is a real loss for the industry as a whole.” Elon Musk’s first major Twitter product was halted after fake accounts spread Twitter Gaming employees would also occasionally collaborate on larger projects such as the League of Legends World Championship, Summer Game Fest, and the Game Awards. Riot Games said its deal with Twitter will see advertisers spend less on Riot’s esports videos. Twitter also benefits from the deal, earning ad revenue on Riot’s videos. “The only money right now is flowing from Twitter to Riot and not the other way around,” said Riot spokesman Joe Hixson. He added that Riot’s last paid promotion was during the November 2021 launch of Netflix’s “League of Legends” series, “Arcane,” in which Riot paid to promote certain tweets to reach a larger audience. “We’re still committed to posting content on Twitter (even in turbulent times like these) because of how important it has become to our community.” League of Legends esports has yet to make a profit. That’s okay, says Riot. Media entrepreneur and gaming event organizer Geoff Keighley declined through a representative to share any updates on how December’s Game Awards will be handled, another time when many in the gaming community take to Twitter to react to news, on Twitter. Previously, Twitter promoted Summer Game Fest with a “hashmoji,” or hashtag ending in emoji, as well as Twitter Spaces. “One of the things we’ve found really fun about Twitter is just the sense of community,” Keighley said in an interview in May. Amid a week-long flurry of changes on Twitter, the Game Awards announced Thursday that they’ve partnered with gaming communication app Discord so people can watch and discuss the event together next month. It plans to take advantage of Discord’s Twitter Spaces-like features.
Surprising influencers with the promise of money After buying Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, Musk has sought to improve its profit margins. To that end, his proposal to upgrade an existing Twitter subscription product, called Twitter Blue, was simple enough: Users pay $8 a month for a blue checkmark. In practice, the democratization of the blue tick has created an immediate series of problems. In response, on Friday morning, Twitter suspended Twitter Blue signups, citing “impersonation issues.” Users in some countries with a lower standard of living said the fee is unaffordable. Some users have started buying tickers for accounts impersonating famous companies and personalities. (Earlier this week, a fake account impersonating Nintendo of America posted a photo of Mario making an obscene gesture.) “We’ve been looking for verified accounts to give us legit and real information for years, and it’s hard to see these accounts all of a sudden and wonder if they’re legit or not,” said Melissa Prizzia, a 25-year-old Twitch user. streamer from Morristown, NJ, who goes by the name XSET NuFo, “especially for people who don’t use Twitter regularly and don’t know about all these changes.” We ‘verified’ Twitter in minutes impersonating the comedian and senator Before Musk took over Twitter, the Twitter Blue subscription service cost $5 a month and allowed people to edit their tweets for 30 minutes after they were posted. It had no relation to the blue check mark, which was previously reserved for news outlets, journalists, celebrities, politicians and other notable public figures who had to verify their identity with the platform. Musk said the checkmark subscription would give Twitter a revenue stream for paying creators. Historically,…
