Twitch CEO’s advice for tech addicts is not good news for those in China who love attention-seeking apps

Twitch CEO says watching something for two hours in a row is a lot better than checking an app multiple times within a two-hour period

Reading Time:2 minutes

People watch the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare video game trailer at the Activision booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in Los Angeles. While most broadcasters freely stream themselves playing games, many influencers with millions of followers are now regularly sponsored or paid by game publishers. Photo: AP

Published: 7:32am, 27 Nov 2018Updated: 8:39am, 27 Nov 2018

If you are seeking tips on how to overcome a tech addiction, the answer from the world’s biggest game streaming site might sound a bit counter-intuitive.

For Emmett Shear, chief executive of San Francisco-based Twitch, Amazon.com’s live streaming site aimed at gamers, watching something for two hours in a row is a lot better than checking an app multiple times within a two-hour period.

“The way that a lot of mobile apps work is this dopamine rush,” Shear said in an interview with technology news title Recode, which published the full transcript last week. “Push notify, get a nugget of new information, open News Feed. Twitch is just not that. And so, I think we suffer less from a lot of the addiction, ‘Gotta press the button 19 times a day’ kind of interactions.”

As of August 2018, Twitch was estimated to have 15 million daily active users and 2.2 million broadcasters monthly, way ahead of rivals like YouTube Gaming. One of the hottest pro gamers on Twitch, Ninja, recently attracted about 650,000 viewers when he streamed playing the popular survival-shooter Fortnite with rap star Drake.

Shear, however, said that Twitch is not building an “addiction loop” like social apps, such as Facebook and Instagram. Its users, according to Shear, do not open the streaming service multiple times a day, they open it for a long time when they use it. “I actually think that is a much healthier way of interacting with your technology, and with entertainment,” he said.

Gaming addiction under spotlight in China as regulators tighten control on industry