In honor of its 10th anniversary, Twitch has introduced an all-new feature called Animated Emotes for users. Emotes are meme-like images that viewers can share during a live stream in the chat to express their opinions or thoughts.
Ivan Santana, senior director of Community Product at Twitch states the emotes provide a universal meaning and animated emotes were the most popular requests among Twitch users:
“Emotes are a language that transcends countries. Anywhere you are in the world, they mean the same thing for us. I’ve been at Twitch for four years, and it’s something people have been asking for since before I joined. It’s certainly been a very, very long time.”
Twitch streamers can create customised animated emotes and also access templates such as Shake, Rave, Roll, Spin, Slide In and Slide Out. The animated emotes will be restricted to 60-frame GIFs with a maximum size of 512MB. Viewers that are sensitive to the emotes will have the option to opt-out of the feature. Twitch partners can access the feature in the coming weeks while Affiliates can gain access by the end of this year.