Rachel Delphin at Twitchcon 2024: “I think when you see games that really capture the culture, you’ll see them on Twitch”

• Twitchcon 2024 has just wrapped up, and we were on the ground at the convention!
• We got to chat with numerous key people managing Twitch behind the scenes
• The subject of this interview is Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Delphin

With Twitchcon 2024 in Rotterdam having just wrapped up, the whole thing may have passed you by. But if you thought that one of the worlds biggest streaming conventions wouldn't have anything to do with mobile, you'd be wrong!

We were on the ground at Twitchcon 2024 and got the chance to meet up with some of the key management people who handle the behind-the-scenes action for the massive streaming platform. Specifically, we also got to chat with them about, what else? Mobile gaming!

So, here's the first in a series of interviews about Twitch, its relations to mobile gaming, and what we can expect going forward. First up on the docket is Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Delphin, who handles marketing (duh) and other activities to help promote Twitch and its creators, including events like Twitchcon 2024!

So, let's dive in.

PocketGamer.com: Can we ask what your favourite mobile game is, if you have one?  Rachel Delphin: I've been playing Pokemon Go now for a great many years, I think I'm like level 32. TwitchCon is always a great place to catch some Pokemon. So you’ll see me doing that as I'm walking around. 

And then I play this other one called Swipe. It's kind of a logic game that I'm not very good at yet. But you're basically trying to eliminate dots with Swipes in the fewest amount of moves you can. And it’s very challenging, at least for me.

What do you think of the current state of mobile gaming? Is there any interest from Twitch in exploring it further?

I think mobile gaming has really opened up and broadened the appeal and the idea of games generally; because it made it accessible to a whole bunch of people who don't have gaming PCs or consoles necessarily, which can be a real barrier to entry and so it’s become a sort of onboarding point.

Now, some people are, of course, exclusively mobile gaming players. And then there's a lot of people, I imagine, who get into the universe. And you see games like Fortnite, who are actually investing in really deep immersive mobile games. 

And I imagine you'll see people also migrating towards consoles and other things like that. So I think it plays an important role in the ecosystem.

In terms of streaming, we really follow our streamers interest on that. So part of that is how you enable it. Because streaming, particularly when you're gaming, tends to be multi-screen. So you have the capture card to make sure you're showing your gameplay and then you also have your camera.

So it’s about making sure there's actually the peripheral technological tools to enable the right screen capture on mobile.

But otherwise, I don't see any real limitations besides being a critical mass of people who also want to watch it. But we know that there's mobile games that are hugely popular. And so I wouldn't be surprised if you see some growth.

Speaking of creators, Twitch has an incredibly vibrant career community in gaming and other content creation. So where do you think mobile fits into that? 

Well, as you saw, we just announced a mobile redesign. I think we started out where streaming was very much - you're inside and you tended to be in your room. Whether that was gaming, music or whatever your interest or passion was, that was what you were streaming. But with more powerful mobile devices it enables people to do more IRL streaming and to do things outside the home because they're able to capture wherever they are and whatever they do. 

I think every single year gets a lot easier. It used to be the case that you had to have a ‘streaming backpack’ which is basically the power of the internet and everything you would normally have carried around on your back, which was quite cumbersome. 
But now, as you can see here, people are just using their phones and able to do IRL live streaming. So it's really enabled us to like, you know, sort of leave the home or leave a stationary setting and do a lot more outside. We see more IRL as a result. We see a lot of travel streaming as a result. And I expect that that will continue. 

Have you seen streamers getting more interested in bringing mobile to their streams and content creation?

Just conversation. It's not something that I've seen a lot of, but certainly it does happen. I think there's a long tail of. It's not something that's one of our largest growing categories, but I expect that can change at any time. 

And a lot of it has to do with the content available. A hit game, or whatever the case may be, can really spark interest. 

For example, we see people do things like Wordles. So people often sort of open a stream and do like, you know, ‘join me for the Wordle of the day’. And as you might imagine, it's Twitch; people are both cheering and trolling as this person is trying to do that. And so I think when you see these sorts of games that really capture the culture [of streaming] that you will also see them on Twitch. 

So this is probably going to be a pretty obvious one. I mean, Dan [Clancy] was up on stage basically talking about it the entire time. How do you see the changes to Twitch’s mobile app helping communities to grow?

So part of it is making discovery easier. As Dan shared on stage, we've got about 70% of new viewers in particular who actually start their first sessions on mobile. So it's really important that you capture that interest and that we make it easier to discover live streams that might interest you.

So that should really help streamers find new viewers because we've really optimised for that experience. Part of growing is also keeping people engaged, and things like stories, things like clips, which allow people who may who may even be primarily desktop users to catch up easily to stay connected.

So it's really a two-pronged approach. One is to make sure that when people have 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes and they want to open the Twitch app that they can find things they can find the people that they like already catch up on their content. And then also, of course, the desktop experience when you have those sort of longer sessions that people tend to really gravitate towards on Twitch. 

One last thing; cosplay is obviously a huge part of many content creators' careers. And one subject of a lot of these cosplays is mobile, or at least multiplatform, games. Why do you think that is?

I think there's been a lot of passion when there's high interest and really good IP. So it’s when there’s a lot of interest, it's about the character work, beautiful costuming and all of those things they really do tend to just catch; on. I think the medium is beside the point. It’s all about how captivating are the characters in the story and then you see all sorts of fan art and the streaming sort of comes around it to celebrate and really reflect the popularity of those franchises.