TwitchCon 2025: European streamers time to shine

Metro

04-06-2025

As Twitch begins a big push towards mobiles and vertical streaming, the recent TwitchCon event in Rotterdam showcased both the company's talent and its CEOs.
Although TwitchCon started a decade ago now, it's evolved from a once modest convention for the streaming community to an unmissable celebration of online culture, live entertainment, and digital influence. This year's European event in Rotterdam stood not only as a testament to Twitch's enduring importance but also to show how European content creators are carving their own niche in the global streaming arena.
Convention centre Ahoy Rotterdam welcomed tens of thousands of fans, creators, and industry partners across two days filled with panels, meet-and-greets, drag shows, and… Warhammer mini painting. The emphasis was on community, but there was a palpable sense of change in the air, as Twitch showcased how it's planning changes around the shifting landscape of monetisation, platform trust, and regulation.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy explained to me how important it was, to have a European presence: 'A lot of times when people talk about Twitch, they always think, how is it different to meet the needs of this European country or whatever? I think that Twitch needs are universal needs. Humans are humans, whether they're German or French or Italian or English.'
'Certainly, different cultures have different characteristics. We do a ton to support our streamers in every country, we do a lot of meet-ups, and we localise our platform for the different markets. Obviously, we have to do things like making sure the currencies that are different in different markets work but we very much think of ourselves as a global platform.
'And so everything we do is sort of focused on the global communities that form on Twitch. When we picked TwitchCon, it's mostly trying to balance and find a place so that folks can come, we looked around and everybody, the community, loved Rotterdam. But one of the things that happens in Rotterdam is we have a bigger imprint on the city when we're there.
'That's what we've experienced when we're in San Diego versus, if TwitchCon is in Los Angeles or Vegas. It's not as distinctive, because those towns have so much going on, and so Rotterdam was really welcoming. They were excited to have us. So it's really been great here in Rotterdam as opposed to saying TwitchCon Europe. The big thing we keep trying to think of is Twitch is really a language-based platform, hence, Twitch is kind of borderless.'
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It's no coincidence that European creators are front and centre this year. As Twitch faces stiffer competition than previous years, especially in the States from platforms like YouTube Live, and Kick. Its European community has become one of its most stable and vibrant, known for its loyal viewership, cross-border and language collaborations, and charity events like France's ZEvent, which raised over €10 million (£8.4 million).
Upcoming legend Aimee 'Aimsey' Davies has carved out a powerful presence on Twitch since launching her career in 2018. The Welsh streamer, known for her hyped Minecraft content and emotional discussions on LGBTQ+ topics, has built a following of over 1 million fans.
A proud lesbian and advocate for inclusivity, Aimsey has become a fixture in the Minecraft scene, collaborating with top creators like TommyInnit and Tubbo. Her impact was recognised with the LGBTQ+ Streamer of the Year award at the 2022 Gayming Awards and in 2025 she joined Red Bull as their latest esports ambassador, continuing her mission to champion representation in gaming.
With pink hair and a special style in shoes, Saiiren brings a different kind of magic to Twitch. A VTuber (anime avatar), she turned personal health issues – a heart condition and the resulting isolation during the pandemic – into a springboard for creativity and chat. With over 200,000 followers, she blends music, games, and storytelling as a testament to her resilience.
Last but not least, with a following of over 5 million, I spoke to Tubbo, a popular UK Minecraft streamer bout tips he had for success in streaming and what he was up to at TwitchCon.
'If you want to succeed in streaming, just have fun with it. I guess because the more time, the more you enjoy it, the more you'll do it, which means the more hours you'll stream, which means the higher chance you'll have of finding lucky success. I recently did a subathon where I streamed for 64 days straight, and I did like 45 events during that, back-to-back, and that was pretty good.
'My community is just so chill. They're just always around to hang out and do something crazy, and they do also make fun of me a lot. I guess that's just kind of our dynamic. I met 200 people from my community yesterday.
'From Dan's announcements, yesterday I was quite excited for being able to rewind VODs back. That's gonna be so useful for producing live events and getting replays, because the biggest pain is you have to wait 10 minutes, but real-time that's gonna be really nice for events.
'If you're doing any sports event and you want instant replays, and you're not recording locally, that's gonna be really useful, because I know that's what a lot of live events do, they stream on YouTube at the same time, just so they can have that wind back for replays. So, it's a game changer.
'In my future. Well, you're only young once. I run a Minecraft hosting company which provides free service to people. I currently have 170,000 Minecraft servers, so probably just keep working on that, because it's quite new. Only been doing it for a few months and that's something you think, once you're a building service, that's my vibe, building services.'
TwitchCon 2025 also served as a platform for the company to unveil key features. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy took to the main stage on Saturday morning to outline a raft of new features in his keynote speech, which included vertical streaming aimed at mobile phones. Plus, creators being able to stream in both horizontal and vertical formats simultaneously, as well as in 2K, as the new HEVC codec provides high-quality video at lower bitrates.
A new feature called Combos lets viewers react to big moments using Twitch-based digital currency Bits, encouraging hype parties through shared effects. Affiliate requirements are also becoming more accessible and Twitch is making it easier for non-Affiliates to collect earnings before hitting payout thresholds. But the big news of the weekend was the rewind feature, letting viewers catch missed moments and jump back into livestreams.
I spoke to Clancy about these intended improvements to the platform and community: 'The reality is, if you're under 25 today, you grew up with a phone in your hand and you have very high expectations about a mobile device. Historically, Twitch's core userbase have been PC gamers. PC gamers all have a big monitor somewhere in their house, usually with a gaming device right there and that's why a lot of our watch time comes on the desktop.
'But that's because people put it on while they're doing other things. But we need to really be thinking in the future. More and more people may not have a big desk, a big screen somewhere in their house. More Trending
'Mobile is central to how people maintain their community and maintain that engagement. So we've been, in the last year, spending a lot of time getting the app more in line with most mobile devices. I think having vertical viewing is sort of obvious. People like holding their phone like that, and that's just really thinking much more about mobile as a primary platform of engaging and maintaining your community.
'We talked about clips, and we need to make clips on the platform easier to get to. We have the Stories feature. One of the things I often talk about is I love making it so that streamers will find three to five moments after every stream and publish it to Stories, so that way their community can catch up if they missed that stream.'
A red flag that wasn't addressed was Twitch's recent decision to limit stored highlights and video uploads to 100 hours per user. The change, which quietly took effect earlier this year, has disproportionately impacted speedrunners and esports archivists who rely on long term storage for competitive documentation. Twitch has defended the move as necessary for server cost efficiency, but the blowback has been severe, with some creators moving their archives to YouTube or independent hosting platforms.
As the event came to a close on Sunday afternoon, attendees streams over the weekend displayed a dynamic mishmash of cosplay, dance challenges, charity speedruns, and heartfelt shoutouts to the closest of communities. It was evidence that Twitch has become not just a streaming service but a living, breathing organism built by its users, a pulsing mess of the best and worst of gameplay, personality, and technology. Whether Twitch can continue to navigate the maze of innovation, controversy, and competition remains to be seen, but it is trying to keep moving with the times.
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