Twitch is already good at selling people on games, but it’s not interested in selling the games directly.
Twitch CEO: “Entire Website” Is a Native Advertising Hub, Not a Store
“If you change that into a storefront, you destroy a lot of what’s great about Twitch.”
That’s the word from CEO Emmett Shear, asked at TechCrunch Disrupt about how the company plans to integrate with its new owner Amazon. Although its viewers may not think they’re watching ads, he said game developers and publishers are warming to the idea of livestreamed games as native advertising.
“Our entire website, in some ways, is a native advertising unit for videogames,” Shear said.
Those game creators, of course, want to sell more copies of their games, and Twitch is working with them to get better at driving viewers to “buy” links, Shear added. However, he said, users shouldn’t expect to see official Amazon “add to cart” buttons on the site any time soon.
“I do think we’ll be doing a lot more to aid our partners if they want to do that (sell games), but there’s a difference between that and serving as a storefront for Amazon,” he said, adding, “If you change that into a storefront, you destroy a lot of what’s great about Twitch.”
When asked about Amazon’s habit of pushing additional purchases on users, based on what other users have bought, Shear said the two companies “haven’t discussed data sharing.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
