HUGE Notifications Update, Gift Sub Discounts, & More! | Patch Notes HIGHLIGHTS (Dec 2025)

[music] Welcome to our final patch notes of the year. This is so exciting. We love to chat with you all, our community, about what's going on behind the scenes at Twitch. My name is Mary. I'm head of the community here and I'm joined by this festive man, Dan. What's going on with your hat? Tell me about your uh Is this Santa Claus? My uh Yeah, my outfit. Last year they they created this this fun outfit for me. So I decided it'd be a fun thing to wear for the um uh for the last patch notes of the year given wishing everybody a happy holidays. Last week we talked a little bit about some notifications. Um we are going to talk about that a little bit more. And to do that we're going to need to bring back fan favorite Amanda. Can I please have Amanda join us? Hi Amanda. Hello. Last month, we dove into how we're rolling out this update to notification settings to make it clearer and more organized. There are two key changes. One is that you will see a reorganized notification settings dashboard with clearer categories. Second is that you will have more customizable channel specific notifications. So, what does that look like? For the channels that you follow, we're switching it from an on and off toggle to giving you four more granular options. We're adding an always option. On is now mapped to personalized. Go live only is your third option. And lastly, you have off, which I hope is self-explanatory. So, we did this because it's designed to help you better stay connected with your favorite channels and communities while having more control over what other notifications you receive. A a little while ago, we had started to look at instances where um you know, people, let's say, haven't visited a channel for like three months and they're still getting live up notifications, but there were some people that were like, "No, I really want to keep receiving them." And um so I know I talked to some creators about that and some viewers and I like the fact now that somebody for a particular channel, they can say, "We don't want you to be smart. We don't want you to, you know, target me and figure out what's right for me. just always send it because that way they can express that and I think that's one of the nice things that this launch offers and I can speak to the personalized option that people now have because I know we had a lot of questions around that. So on how it worked before so if you turned on your channel level notification setting um we were personalizing it. It just wasn't as clear for folks. Um and so what we've done is make that label clearer. It functions the same way as it did before. If you are someone that thought you were getting every notification for a channel and you want to switch that, you can now go in and do it as we roll out this dashboard. The types of notifications and the volume that you get right now likely will not it will not change. Not likely. It won't change on day one. This is going to give you more control going forward. And we wanted to honor everyone's permissions. Not only did we want to, we needed to. If you opted into something before, you will still get that notification. If you opted out, you will still not receive it. We always need for you to explicitly consent when you opt into a new notification. We cannot do that on your behalf. So, I really wanted everyone to feel like they were still in control of what options that they've already selected. This has meant that going forward, you will have better organization and some clearer controls around what messaging you get. Um, I think this is really important to also recognize, you did say this, but there will always be people who will be like, if I've already been on this site for a while, are you altering any of my notifications? And the answer is no. We are not altering any of your notifications. For new people, um, they will get this new updated system and there will be some automation for it. But for anyone who has an existing channel, we're not changing anything. This is your time to now go into your notifications and make them more personalized for you. Turn off notifications for specific channels that you don't want to see notifications for, even if you follow them. Um, go to uh try personalized so that you can get uh more accurate notifications. Um, this is all customizable by you now, but we haven't changed anything. One of my last notes on this is that you will see at the top of your dashboard, your notifications dashboard, an option for smart delivery. This works the same way as smart notifications. We just renamed it because it was kind of confusing to have personalized and smart. And so what smart delivery speaks to is that if you've opted into a notification and you have opted on multiple channels, desktop, mobile, you and you might not want to get it all those places. What smart delivery does is tries to check where you are online and then sends you the notification there. This is not foolproof. If you have the tab backgrounded, we might send the notification there because we think you're active. So, that's another place where if you want that notification sent to all devices, turn off smart delivery. If you want us to not send redundant notifications and you want it only on one device, turn on smart delivery. If you've already been using smart notifications, it works the same way as it did before. It just has a new name. Okay. And we also had recap that recently went live and I know that it went live because a lot of people have been posting their recaps. I'm certain there are people that are watching that are like, I didn't get my recap. How do they get their recap in their notifications? We do have a category that covers Twitch recap. So, you can opt in if you want to get it and if you want to be notified on desktop, mobile, etc. To be clear, you will still have a recap even if you didn't get a notification for it. So, it's more like if you feel like you missed it because you didn't get that email or you didn't get that on-site notif, this is going to ensure that in future years you do. Let's move on to our next update, uh, which is our last sitewide promo of the year. Dan, tell us a little bit about what's going on. Twitch will be offering our last sitewide promo featuring a 35% dis off discount on gift sub bundles of five plus on both web and mobile. And now the reminder as there's other sitewide promos. The cost of the discounts, it's shared between us based upon um uh revenue share. If for any reason you don't want to participate, you can turn off the promos. But um streamers have seen very strong results um uh with the sitewide promos. So, we know that um uh it's been good at helping driving more uh more revenue for streamers. And towards the end of the year, hopefully there's a lot of excitement. It starts on Tuesday the 23rd at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time. It's to Friday the 2nd of January at 10 10 a.m. Pacific time. Um and so you can also think about other things that you're doing as part of that to try and encourage at the end of the year your community to be um leaning in and giving you more gift subs. It is time to talk about reactions to clips. This is something that you, Dan, talked about in your keynote this year, and it got really good reactions from the audience. People like the idea of being able to say, "I like that clip," or, "I want to uh interact with that clip." Tell us a little bit about where we're at with it. As of uh as of today, as of December 9th, um we've launched a new reactions on clips feature across all mobile and web platforms. With reactions, viewer can now react to clips with emotes. a reactor clip by tapping the like icon or long pressing the icon to select from one of four emote slots. Love, hype, laugh, sad. Channel owners now have the ability, so streamers pay attention, to swap out the global preset emotes with custom emotes from their own channel. While the specific emotes displayed on the channel's clip can be customized, the live reaction categories like, love, hype, laugh, and sad are fixed. So, those words are fixed, but you can change what sad is, which is a really great way for you to personalize your community's experience. Head to cl the clip reactions settings. It's under your stream settings in your creator dashboard to customize your channel's emotes. Next, Dan, we're going to talk a little bit about hype train emotes. Yeah. So, we're adding five more retro inpired hype train emotes to the rewards pool. It's on 1218. Created by community art artist Lost. They're a self-taught 3D artist animator based in Brooklyn, New York. We added 45 new hype train emote rewards in 25. Um, of course with more coming next year. So last week we announced that in compliance with Australia's social media minimum age law, Australian users under the age of 16 will no longer be allowed to have an account on Twitch. Existing Australian Twitch users under the age of 16 were notified that their accounts would be deactivated on January 9th, 2026. Anyone who believes that they've received this email incorrectly can reach out to customer support and provide governmentissued identity documentation. So we are we are actively trying to avoid any accidental or you know uh you know we don't want to harm any accounts that should not be impacted by this. So, check out your notifications. Uh, take check take a look at your emails and see uh but uh hopefully this is as accurate as possible to only impact people who are genuinely under the age of 16. Now, upon turning 16s, users who had their account deactivated can reach out to customer support to have their accounts reinstated so that they can maintain their account usernames. Um if you have any questions we have a help uh article with dedicated on this topic or reach out to um uh customer support um so that we can help you. All right let's talk a little bit about moderation. So [clears throat] this morning we've shared that we're rolling out lead moderator a new role that helps streamers manage their growing communities. Lead mods can add or remove other moderators and also update all channel moderation settings, including those previously only available to streamers. The one exception is that private blocked terms will continue to only be visible to the channel owner. Um, so to appoint a lead mod, head to the roles manager page in your creator dashboard. Um, and we want to see how this new role helps you manage your ch your channel more effectively. Um, so we've also made an update so that moderators will see live updates to viewer card chat logs when new messages are sent. So viewer cards will also now include dropped messages that were not sent to chat due to being flagged as being sent by suspicious users. So that way the moderator will get more information in the chatard. I want to remind everybody that our mod club is rapidly growing. We already have uh over 6,500 people in the Discord, which is crazy. Is a very I it's actually our most uh talkie Discord that we've ever managed, which is so exciting. A lot of really passionate and um important people in there, and we'd love to have you be a part of it. If you are a mod, and we do check if you're a mod, so uh make sure you've taken some mod actions, you can check out the link in chat, which has now been pinned, um to learn more about how you can join our mod club discord and attend future events. It's also really important for us because we can use it to get quick data or feedback on uh upcoming things that will help our moderation team like lead moderator