Mr. Shear said in a blog post that he was stepping down
because he had just had a child. He said that Dan Clancy, Twitch’s president,
would take over as chief executive, and that Mr. Shear would remain at Twitch
in an advisory role.
“Twitch often feels to me like a child I’ve been raising as
well,” he wrote. “And while I will always want to be there if Twitch needs me,
at 16 years old it feels to me Twitch is ready to move out of the house and
venture alone.”
Mr. Shear leaves a platform with big challenges, but also
one that has grown drastically in recent years and become the cultural center
of the video game world. Now, livestreamers who broadcast themselves gaming,
cooking or chatting with fans can attract audiences of thousands and earn
millions of dollars on the site, which is owned by Amazon.
The platform started in 2007 as Justin.tv, a livestreaming
project following the life of Justin Kan, who started the site with Mr. Shear
and two others. Mr. Shear wrote that he “thought at the time that we would most
likely fail and give up in less than a year.”
Instead, the site became a hub for live video and
transitioned into Twitch in 2011, a place where video game players streamed
their play. In 2014, Amazon bought the site for $1 billion.
As Twitch has grown, it has faced the same questions as
other social platforms, such as how it should regulate harmful content and keep
its users happy. It also faces the question of how best to cater to its star
content creators, many of whom have been lured away to rival platforms like
YouTube. In the past several years, Twitch creators have called out the
platform for not doing enough to protect them from stalkers and online
harassment, and complained that the site took too high a cut of their earnings.
Despite the controversy, Twitch has continued to thrive. The
site now attracts seven million streamers each month and 31 million viewers
daily.
Now, Mr. Clancy, who was already running the site’s
day-to-day operations, will take over. A longtime Google employee and Nextdoor
executive, he lacks the video game background of Mr. Shear, a fervent player of
the game StarCraft.
“It’s a strength and a weakness,” Mr. Clancy said of his
lack of a gaming background in an interview last year. “It’s a strength because
I don’t come to Twitch with these preconceived ideas of Twitch.”
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