Whether you’ve been here since day one, or are brand new to Twitch, Twitch are glad you’re here. This Sunday, Twitch celebrates its 10th anniversary and they wanted to celebrate with something special for their community. What better gift than emotes, the unofficial (but official) language of Twitch? Emotes help viewers and creators identify themselves and their communities. People are passionate about them. They collect them. There are legends and myths about them (who’s really seen a golden Kappa in the wild?). They allow fans to support their favorite communities and show off that pride.

Today, Twitch are announcing four great updates that will be launched later this month. They’re making it easier for all Twitch creators to use emotes to personalize and grow their communities.

Animated Emotes

Sometimes a good emote is all you need to express yourself. Sometimes you need a little bit extra. With the launch of Animated Emotes, which they expect to make available to Partners in a few weeks (and Affiliates by the end of 2021), creators can add up to five new animated emotes as a benefit for Tier 1 subscribers.

You’ll be able to manage and upload Animated Emotes from the Emotes page. To get ready, you can learn more about getting started with Animated Emotes here. Time to talk with your favorite artists!

Viewers who may be sensitive to animations will be able to turn this functionality off in their Chat Settings.

Add Animation to Existing Emotes

Twitch knows it takes time to create the perfect emote. They want Animated Emotes to be extra fun, not extra work. Creators will be able to upload custom GIFs to animated slots, or easily add one of six animations to an existing emote. If you’re looking for an emote to start with, you can always select from these default emotes. Here are the six animations that will be available at launch:

Follower Emotes (beta)

Creators have long asked for better ways to attract and welcome new viewers to their channel. What’s more Twitchy than a whole tier of emotes to help newly minted community members say hello?

Twitch are experimenting with Follower Emotes, and will be making these available in beta to select Partners & Affiliates. This new tier of channel emotes lets creators grow their communities by offering viewers a fun, free benefit to hitting the “Follow” button. Follower Emotes can only be used on the channel in which they are unlocked. They’ll be collecting feedback during beta to help Twitch test and improve the product. Based on what we learn, we hope to begin rolling it out more widely later this year.

Creators with beta access can select up to five emotes to populate the new free tier, accessed via the Emotes page of Creator Dashboard. Upload new emotes, reassign them from other tiers, or choose from a selection of default emotes provided by Twitch.

Library: A new home for emotes (yep,all of them)

Where will creators find all these new goodies? In January, Twitch upgraded how creators can manage their emotes, centralizing everything into a one-stop shop on the Emotes tab of Creator Dashboard. Twitch also teased that we were listening to feedback that creators wanted a place to store all their emotes and easily swap them in and out of tiers without having to delete and reupload every time. Well, it’s finally here.

To help creators better manage their digital assets, Twitch is introducing the Library, which allows emotes that have been approved to be stored and easily accessible, even if they’re not active. Creators will be able to control which emotes are active and assign them to different tiers, all from one place. By building better emote infrastructure, they are offering Twitch users more ways to express themselves, giving creators more control over the culture of their communities, and helping them be more agile by making it simpler to enable, disable, and reassign emotes without the need to re-submit for approval.

The library will be located on the Emotes page and will be available to all Partners and Affiliates. In order to be able to review, respond and approve what we expect will be an increased volume of emote submissions in a timely manner, Twitch will be rolling Library out in phases. Partners and some Affiliates will have access at launch and they plan to roll out as quickly as possible. Twitch anticipates all Partners and Affiliates will have access to the Library within a few months. Creators will be notified when they receive access, and they’ll see Library show up on their Emotes page.

Twitch hope you’re as excited as they are about these releases. Stay tuned for updates on when you can expect to access them in the next few weeks.

The fun doesn’t stop here, we have so much more planned to celebrate 10 years of Twitch, and most importantly, 10 years of their community. Stay tuned for an announcement about their official 10 Year celebration – coming soon™.