A Look Into the Future of Esports On Twitch

Esports has been top of mind at Twitch, even before the recent stay-at-home situation expedited the global growth of esports. Notably, we have and will continue to invest heavily in Twitch Rivals, a tournament series made with Twitch streamers in mind, which continues to push the boundaries of esports entertainment. In April of this year we also launched the esports directory which puts all of the professional esports content on Twitch in one central place so you can more easily watch live events, discover new esports channels, and learn how to better play your favorite games from the best pro players.

Today, we’re excited to give you a sneak peek into our next esports initiative.

Competition Tools to Empower Communities        

The next wave of professional esports players are out there right now, hustling to rise to the next level and we want to support their mission by further democratizing esports competition creation. We understand not all competition organizers have the tools or resources needed to host esports tournaments and it’s important to us to ensure we’re empowering organizers and players of all sizes and skill levels.

Introducing Versus by Twitch (Beta), an end-to-end suite of competition tools for organizers, players, and viewers from all different backgrounds and experience levels. Competition organizers can quickly and easily create, manage, and stream competitions with their communities of players and viewers – all integrated on Twitch.  

Learning From Competition Organizers

Today we’re announcing our closed beta featuring a select group of competition organizers from a range of backgrounds including:

• Collegiate esports leagues 
• Game Developers 
• And of course, Twitch Rivals & Twitch Creators   

Our goal is to get as many of you access as quickly as we can but over the coming months our focus will be on making sure the competition experience is capable of handling competitions, both complex and casual, as well as listening to and incorporating feedback from our beta community. We’re extremely excited to roll this out to the esports community and even more excited to see the future competitions you all are going to organize.

Interested in joining the waitlist for availability? You can do that here.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about the Versus product and connecting with like-minded competition organizers, players, and fans – join our Versus Discord here.