Who Is Harris Heller
Harris Heller is a public figure. Based in Utah the over 30 year old content creator has been a Twitch streamer for many years. Before starting his career on Twitch and before his YouTube channel Alpha Gaming took off, Harris and his wife were known for their music and for their Vines. After not only huge success on YouTube and Twitch, Harris Heller founded his own record label Senpai Records and started producing copyright free music for streamers.
Harris Heller Leaves Twitch
After many years of streaming on Twitch and many years as a Twitch partner, Harris recently announced that he is leaving Twitch and moving over to YouTube’s streaming service, YouTube Gaming. As the stream doctor Harris Heller has helped many creators not only by explaining how Twitch works, but also by providing free overlays, animations, widgets and more. It seems odd that one of the biggest Twitch gurus, leaves the platform.
Harris Heller is by no means ignorant to the way Twitch has position themselves as a streaming platform over the last years. As his official reason Harris mentioned that his Twitch partner contract ran out, and he decided not to renew his agreement. This makes it sound like he was planning on leaving Twitch for a while and potentially moving to a different platform.
One thing is clear, money is not Harris Heller’s motivation for moving to YouTube, but more so a lack of faith in Twitch as a platform themselves. Over the last years Twitch has done little to stay ahead, or treat their streamers properly. While other platforms like YouTube offer much more than just live streaming, Twitch does nothing to stay ahead.
Should You Switch?
With such an influential Twitch partner leaving the platform and moving over to YouTube Gaming, many small creators asks themselves ‘Should I Switch too?’. Here is what we from Streaming Live Academy believe:
Twitch as a platform is dying. As of now Twitch is still the largest streaming platform and new streamers come to the platform daily, however YouTube Gaming is pulling along fast. With its recent DMCA nuke, Twitch has made it impossible to provide any content that is not live content.
If you are a brand new streamer and you want to get started. We highly recommend you start on YouTube Gaming. Over the next years YouTube as a streaming platform is likely to pull ahead of Twitch, if Twitch does not make some serious moves.
If you are currently streaming on Twitch, we highly recommend you start a YouTube channel and post gaming related content. Grow your channel so that if Twitch goes down in the future, you have your audience build up on YouTube already and can make a switch easier. As Davin Nash said, it is really early to jump ships from Twitch to YouTube, but even he is planning on making the move within the next year or two, as he mentioned in his latest live stream on Twitch.
What do you think? Is Amazon likely to cut Twitch off in the future? Will YouTube Gaming become the largest streaming platform? And what about Facebook Gaming?
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