The streaming platform Twitch wants to discontinue a little-used feature. For this, they are facing significant backlash.
What is this change about? Twitch announced on February 19, 2025, that it will introduce a storage limit of 100 hours for highlights and uploads. Unlike clips, which usually show short, out-of-context situations, highlights are somewhat longer stream excerpts for special moments.
- According to Twitch, the storage costs saved can be invested in tools that work better to increase viewer engagement
- Highlights would hardly help streamers get discovered and made up only 0.1% of the hours watched on Twitch
- Only 0.5% of streamers would currently exceed the limit
Streamers now have until April 19, 2025, to declutter their highlights and uploads – after that, Twitch will start deleting content itself. The streaming platform provides filters to help users find the content they want to keep (via X).
While the change may only affect a tiny percentage of streamers, they seem to be increasingly angry about it and are causing “Twitch” to trend on X with over 160,000 posts.
Speedrunners appear to be particularly affected by the planned change.
Speedrunners seem particularly affected by the change
What makes people so angry? For some content creators, highlights were apparently a way to preserve their time on the streaming platform. They see more than a decade of gaming history threatened with deletion.
- Shayy, who has 329,000 subscribers on YouTube, believes that Twitch would “completely decimate” years of speedrunning history. Due to the longer format, highlights are likely well-suited for speedrunners, allowing them to document entire runs (via X).
- The GTA speedrunner English Ben calls it an “absolute disgrace.” If only 0.5% of streamers would exceed the limit, it can’t be that important to make such a drastic change (via X).
- The streamer Koefficient apparently belongs to the 0.5%. He has highlights from 10 years and would archive his streaming marathons there – now he can’t create new highlights for his playthroughs (via X).
- The speedrunner SHiFT (shown in the cover image via YouTube) points out that there are inactive or even deceased members of the speedrunning community who could not simply download and export their content. Countless games and their history would thus be erased (via X).
What can streamers do? Many Twitch streamers already operate one or more YouTube channels where they upload highlights or even entire VoDs of their streams. Those without such a channel are encouraged to create one quickly to preserve their special memories.
This kind of content re-utilization has already proven to be a kind of money cheat for content creators in recent years.
The planned measure is likely part of Twitch’s years-long struggle to save costs and finally become profitable. While the streaming platform explicitly emphasizes that clips and VoDs are not affected, there has long been a limit for stream recordings in South Korea, until Twitch completely shut down the service there. This presented streamers there with a difficult choice:
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