Twitch really, really wants more streamers to make content together. And, to encourage that, it’s finally adding the feature that killed Squad Stream.
Let us explain: Twitch has been trying to get multi-creator streams to work since March 2019. That’s when it introduced Squad Stream, a tool that allowed up to four streamers to appear together in a single unified broadcast. Squad Stream seemed like a cool collab function at first, but it had serious issues, the biggest of which was that even though streamers were appearing together on one stream, their chats would be split. So, they’d each be focusing on chatting with their own individual audience while trying to group stream.
Twitch retired Squad Stream in late 2023, saying it ultimately had an adoption rate of fewer than 1% of Partner streams and attributing that very low uptake to Squad Stream missing a shared chat and other creator-desired features. At the same time, though, Twitch introduced a tool to replace it: Stream Together, which essentially did the same thing as Squad Stream, but was slicker and had a few more features…though it still kept chats split.
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But no longer. At this year’s TwitchCon, running Sept. 20-22 in San Diego, CEO Dan Clancy said merged chats are coming to Stream Together.
Speaking to attendees, he mentioned Knock, the Stream Together-adjacent tool that allows streamers who follow each other to “knock” and ask for collabs while they’re live.
“When we knock on these people’s door, we will all be in one chat stream,” he said. “That way everyone is in one chat session, hanging with each other.”
Twitch says when Stream Together chats are merged, streamers will be able to “tell at a glance which messages came from their community.” It also says mods from all channels involved in the Stream Together session will be able to work together to moderate the potentially much larger flow of messages than they’d cope with on a single channel. Timeouts and bans can be issued like usual, and users banned from any one channel involved in the collaborative stream will not be able to send messages. (So, if there are four streamers and only one has a specific user banned, that user still cannot comment in the merged chat.)
Streamers who leave a Stream Together session will pull their chat back to their channel with them, and they can also choose to join a multi-creator stream without merging their chat into the group’s, if they prefer.
We’re not sure of the exact date when merged chats will be available, but Clancy said they will roll out to all streamers sometime next week.
