New Twitch Category Makes “Animal Streams” a Thing

Cat Gaming Cat Gaming Cat Gaming

It’s apparently “animal week” over at Twitch.Tv, and in honor of this totally-unprompted declaration of a new holiday, a new category is being added to the streaming website’s extensive list. While it’s not the first time Twitch has added a category, and certainly won’t be the last, I think it’ll be a good long while until we see something this strange crop up again. Twitch’s newest category, “Animals, Aquariums, and Zoos” puts its focus on animals of all kinds – the wild, those in captivity, and those kept as pets.

Some streams are already letting viewers interact with their new furry friends, with donations triggering on-stream events that can, for example, feed the cute little animal you’d been watching.

Will your next favorite streamer be a funny fish? Probably not, but the possibilities alone are fun to think about. What do your pets do while nobody’s home? How about a wildlife cam? Or maybe you can get some exotic interactions at a zoo?

Like with the addition of the “Just Chatting“, Twitch takes another step away from being a wholly gaming-centric space. But that’s not all bad – after all, despite being hugely popular, the Just Chatting section hasn’t overwritten Twitch’s core identity as a game streaming platform – and the Animals, Aquariums, and Zoos category likely won’t reach the heights Just Chatting has seen.

If I had to guess, this’ll probably just go the way of other Twitch fads like TwitchPlaysPokemon – it’s a fun novelty that everyone will look back on fondly, and some people will get some long-term use out of it. But after a while, it’ll only crop up every once in a while if something unusual happens. But that’s all just speculation, who knows what the end result of something like this will be?

SOURCE, SOURCE