Community Shows Anger At Twitch Prime Ad Policy Changes

Twitch Prime will no longer feature ad-free viewing as one of its perks starting in mid-September, according to an announcement made earlier today. While the service will still offer benefits such as a free subscription and in-game content for various games, many in the community feel that the ad-free viewing was a key factor to the program, and its removal is not a good decision.

So you're basically removing the most important function of twitch prime?

— Gustavo H. (@GutoHatwig) August 20, 2018

One of the many Reddit threads popping up about this decision showed exactly what the users think of the changes to Twitch Prime, with user ilovecheese2 stating “I understand why they are doing it, but just like the whole Netflix uproar I expect nothing but negative feedback for Twitch in this decision...

I'd honestly prefer to have ad-free viewing instead of the free games. Not like I use the Twitch Launcher anyway so the games are almost always useless to me.”

Excuse me, but you say you are removing ad-free from Twitch Prime to "be able to give the creators the ad money" but at launch you said "you won't see ads, but don't worry, THE BROADCASTER WILL STILL GET MONEY LIKE YOU WATCHED THE AD" So which one is the lie?

— Dedlok (@Dedlok) August 20, 2018

Their comments are echoed elsewhere, with user -Dissent chiming in “I'm not okay with this, I have no use for the other features. Twitch is removing the one thing I and many others likely use Prime for. Now I have to pay for Turbo to get one feature while I already have Amazon Prime? Pass.

We need to make an uproar over this.

Edit: I genuinely thought the other streaming competitors had zero chance in the market but now that Twitch is charging an additional fee for a feature we had before who knows. People are going to be upset by this and think twice about where they launch or continue their streaming careers. This reeks of working against the user. If you're going to rework Prime/Turbo, this is not the way to do it.”

Why the heck are you getting rid of this feature? The main reason people got Twitch Prime in the first place was for not having to watch ads. This is the dumbest thing you guys have ever done.

— Joey? (@JoeyTaeHyung) August 20, 2018

The sentiments seem to be echoed almost everywhere around the web, with multiple users on Twitter talking about the decision and whether it is worth continuing to use the service now that one of the key features has been removed. It seems that while this may result in an increase in users subscribing to Twitch Turbo, a lot of people are willing to leave it all behind and go back to individual subscriptions while using services such as adblockers.

Right now, Twitch has not made any additional statements regarding the decision, however we’ll update this story if more information comes in.