Quintin “Quin69” Crawford (30) is the leading Twitch streamer for Path of Exile. But even the toughest player gets bored after countless hours. Now Quin69 has found a way to involve the viewers: they can throw a flashbang into the stream.
This is Quin69: The streamer is from New Zealand and is one of the most successful niche streamers on Twitch. He built his career around “Path of Exile”, which is “Diablo 3 for everyone who found Diablo 3 too tame and colorful.”
In recent years, Quin69’s channel has grown to 550,000 followers. When he streams, around 10,000 people regularly watch – strong numbers that put him in the top 200 on Twitch. Quin69 primarily plays Path of Exile, but when he gets bored, he checks out other games. For instance, Quin69 was the biggest streamer for Wolcen, which he once uninstalled without a word.
Quin69 has a somewhat strange relationship with his chat and his fans. They tease the “balding dwarf” and how terrible his builds in Path of Exile are. His reddit is titled: A 1.67 m tall hobbit fails at life on the easiest difficulty level.
However, Quin69 seems to enjoy it. The New Zealander knows how much his viewers love watching him die in Path of Exile.
He is now giving his fans the opportunity to enjoyably sabotage and torment him.
Throw Flashbang
Here’s how viewers can torment the streamer: For streamers on Twitch, two things are important to grow and attract more viewers:
- You have to stand out from others in some way and build a loyal audience
- and strongly involve the chat in your own stream, as this creates a bond.
Many streamers like xQc have automated messages read in the chat, but then ignore them because it’s just spam. Quin69 has come up with something that he can’t easily control. Anyone using their “Channel Points” in Quin69’s stream, which they earned beforehand, triggers a strange function:
- A militaristic-sounding voice says “Throwing Flashbang” – a sound effect from CS:GO
- Shortly thereafter, a blinding flash darts through the room
In some cases, when he’s doing nothing exciting in the stream, Quin69 endures this torture and hardly reacts. “Flashbang goes off? The most normal thing in the world.”
However, when he’s playing Path of Exile and is in the middle of a tough boss fight, the reaction is quite different. He squints his eyes, curses like crazy, and insults the viewer who ignited the flashbang at the most critical moment.
What’s behind it: Quin69 is a pioneer. It’s clear this is the direction Twitch will take in the coming years. They want viewers to actively influence the events in the stream, thereby enhancing the bond between viewer and streamer.
Many ideas suggest that viewers can help their streamers. However, Quin69 shows that they also enjoy tormenting him just as much.
Twitch has been working for many years on ideas to make events on the platform even more interactive. Back in 2017, Kevin Lin, one of the co-founders of Twitch, explained how they envision the future of the platform.
In this context, they apparently took inspiration from “Hunger Games”:
