Animated Emotes Are Coming To Twitch By The End Of The Year

Soon, content creators across Twitch will be able to give their emotes a bit more life. In celebrating its tenth anniversary, Twitch is launching a few changes to emotes, including the option to make them animated.

According to a post on the Twitch blog, animated emotes will first be available to Twitch Partners “in a few weeks.” Affiliates won’t be left out but will likely gain access to animated emotes after Partners, with Twitch saying they would be available by the end of 2021. When they launch, creators will be able to upload a total of five animated emotes for their tier one subscribers to use.

Twitch is also adding a function to disable animated emotes for viewers “who may be sensitive to animations.”

Twitch streamers won’t necessarily have to hire someone to make animated emotes or do it themselves either. When animated emotes launch, creators will be able to apply one of six pre-made animations to their emotes. It wasn’t explicitly said in the post, but it also seems like other pre-made animations for emotes will be made available after the feature’s launch.

Along with animated emotes, Twitch has also announced that it’s toying with the idea of giving the small, personalized pictures to followers. The platform called these an opportunity for creators to “grow their communities by offering viewers a fun, free benefit to hitting the ‘Follow’ button.” This feature will only be released to a small group of Twitch Partners and Affiliates though, and even then will be a beta version.

To manage all those emotes, creators will have access to an emotes library soon as well. The library will be a centralized storage space for emotes, letting creators easily decide which emotes to use or retire, as well as set which subscription tier those emotes are available at.

While emotes are exciting, content creators on Twitch may be preoccupied with other things, like making sure their channel isn’t taken down. A new wave of DMCA claims has hit the platform, prompting creators to once again delete swathes of their content.