In a sudden shadowdrop, Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software announced on Monday that it’s launched its new standalone virtual-reality headset the Steam Frame.

Initially revealed in Nov. 2025 as part of the same initiative that brought us the new Steam Machine, the Steam Frame is a new entry into the VR hardware space.

Valve’s previous VR device, 2019’s Index, was designed to be installed semi-permanently in a single room. The Frame, conversely, is a standalone wireless device that consists of a lightweight headset and two hand controllers, much in the same spirit as the Meta Quest 2.

As with Valve’s other recent hardware projects, the Frame is essentially a specialized PC running the custom SteamOS 3, a Linux-based operating system. The Frame runs off of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with 16GB RAM, a microSD card slot, and two 2160 x 2160 LCD screens, one per eye. Oddly, it does not ship with its own dedicated power supply, but can be recharged using the same kind of USB-C plug as the Steam Deck uses.

As with the rest of Valve’s hardware, the Frame is designed to run games from your Steam library, but doesn’t necessarily run every game that’s currently on Steam. Instead, the Frame has its own verification system similar to the Steam Deck’s, with over 100 games currently hand-tested to be compatible with the Steam Frame. Every Frame also comes with Valve’s 2020 game Half-Life: Alyx as a pack-in bonus.

As with the Steam Machine, Valve plans to offer the first batch of Frames with a lottery system. To minimize the impact of scalpers, Valve intends to leave signups open for both models of the Frame until Thursday morning, then randomize the list once and email customers to let them know if they’re getting a Frame or will end up on the waiting list.

Maybe most importantly, however, the Steam Frame’s starting price is $1,059 for a model with a 256GB internal storage drive. Users who want or need more storage can upgrade to a model with a 1 TB drive for $1,299.

Much as how its low price tag was the biggest point in the Steam Deck’s favor back in 2022, the Frame’s high price tag is an albatross around its neck. Reviews note that it’s a uniquely comfortable device and makes it easier than ever to fire up games in VR, but selling it for over $1,000 means it’s unavoidably aimed at the most hardcore members of what was already a niche market.

• Engadget: Valve Steam Frame review: Solid standalone VR that’s too little, too late
• PC Gamer: The king of convenience
• Eurogamer: Valve’s latest tech is now my go-to VR headset, but it’s not without teething issues
• Ars Technica: Valve’s new $1,049 VR hardware tries to revive an abandoned VR “revolution”

This is the same problem Valve hit with the launch of the Steam Machine back in June, and it’s likely to be an issue for every hardware manufacturer in the market for the foreseeable future. With AI companies gobbling up most of the RAM and hard drives on Earth for data center construction, in an event that’s often nicknamed the “RAMageddon,” any consumers who look to build or buy a new PC or console can expect a bad case of sticker shock for the foreseeable future.

That having been said, the Frame does position Valve to pick up where other companies have left off. Meta was previously the market leader in the VR space (PC Gamer claimed recently that Meta still commands roughly 54% of the VR market), but has made distinct cutbacks in 2026 in favor of refocusing on AI research and wearable computing.

Meta invested heavily in recent years on the assumption that virtual reality was the next big thing, and while it made big strides in making VR accessible, it appears to be in the process of rethinking that bet. VR still has plenty of fans and advocates, but it has yet to live up to the hype factor that it had in the late 2010s. The AI arms race, to some extent, appears to have eaten its lunch.

On paper, Meta’s pullback could’ve left space for Valve to shoulder-check its way into the VR market, but then RAMageddon hit. This wasn’t a bad plan as recently as last year, but the current state of the hardware market makes the Steam Frame a tough lift.

The Seattle-based video game developer behind the award-winning virtual reality adventure Moss has closed its doors.

The announcement was made via Polyarc Games’ LinkedIn page on Friday afternoon. No specific reason was offered for the studio’s closure.

“After nearly 12 years riding the joyous rollercoaster of emotions that is making video games, our time together has come to an end,” wrote an unnamed Polyarc representative. “Thank you to everyone at Polyarc. Our work is now finished.”

Twenty-nine employees will be dismissed due to the studio’s closure, including co-founders Chris Alderson, Danny Bulla, and CEO Tam Armstrong. Polyarc has posted a list of contact information and profiles for all affected employees, in an attempt to help them line up their next positions.

Polyarc’s first and best-known release was 2018’s Moss, where players helped guide a young mouse named Quill through a fantasy world on a journey to save her uncle. It was followed by 2022’s Moss: Book II, a direct sequel that continued Quill’s story, and the 2025 strategy spin-off Glassbreakers.

Polyarc’s most recent release was this year’s Moss: The Forgotten Relic for PC and console, which collected both Moss games into a single non-VR experience.

Armstrong, Bulla, and Alderson founded Polyarc as a startup in 2015. All three were former employees of Bungie in Bellevue, where they’d all worked in different capacities on Bungie’s online shooter Destiny.

Polyarc’s closure comes almost six months after its announcement in March that it’d had to significantly reduce the size of the company, and almost eight months after a wave of layoffs at Meta that forced a major reduction at Bellevue, Wash.-based VR studio Camouflaj (Republique, Batman: Arkham Shadow).

As noted in January, Meta is perhaps the largest current player in the virtual reality sector, largely off the ubiquity of its standalone Quest headsets. When Meta decided to deemphasize its VR efforts in January, reportedly in favor of wearable computing and AI research, it touched off a negative ripple effect throughout the virtual reality field.

There is a chance that Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame may serve as an effective bailout for the VR sector by reigniting consumer interest, but at time of writing, the Frame has no release date. It’s apparently imminent, as suggested by a big leak in August, but there’s nothing definite. If the Steam Machine’s release in June was any indication, however, we can assume the Steam Frame will launch without warning on some random Tuesday morning in the next two months. (Edit, 9/14: Or the following Monday after this was written.)

The September update for Amazon’s cloud-based gaming service Luna comes with multiple new features, the most prominent of which is one that will allow up to 7 other players to remotely participate in the same gaming session.

Since its aggressive relaunch earlier this summer, Amazon has pinned its hopes for Luna on multiplayer games and the casual market. Anyone with an active Amazon Prime subscription has access to Luna and can launch it directly from the Prime Video app, which allows them to stream an assortment of video games to their TV, browser, or tablet via Amazon’s cloud servers.

This includes around 60 casual-friendly multiplayer games, designed to be playable by just about anyone of any age as a group activity, and some of which are exclusive to Luna as a platform.

Its newest feature, Remote Play, changes how multiplayer titles work on the service. One player with a Prime subscription can now invite up to 7 other people to participate remotely in a multiplayer Luna game, as long as all 7 of those people have an account on Amazon and a compatible device. This reportedly works with every multiplayer game on Luna, including those that formerly required every player to physically be in the same room.

Two new games have been added to Luna’s library that specifically take advantage of Remote Play. This includes a Luna-exclusive mobile version of Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield’s 2011 board game King of Tokyo, in which players take the role of giant monsters fighting one another in the ruins of Japan.

Other additions to Luna this month include access to two relatively recent games from the French publisher Ubisoft: 2024’s Star Wars: Outlaws and 2023’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the latter of which is set in the universe of James Cameron’s film franchise.

Amazon has not shared user data for Luna since its recent relaunch, so it’s difficult to tell from outside the company how much of an audience it’s been able to build. Luna represents a bet by Amazon that, in the midst of the ongoing component crunch and the related rise in hardware costs, it can build an audience by offering access to popular video games via whatever devices people might already have in their homes.

A few years ago, cloud gaming as a whole was one of the major topics in the games industry, with some analysts going so far as to predict that it was the future of hardware. Instead of purchasing an Xbox or PlayStation in your own home, you’d simply dial into a remote server and stream games to your TV.

That gold rush has largely faded in recent years, as the furor over genAI has stolen some of its thunder, but cloud gaming is still a going concern and a surprisingly competitive market. Luna might be the most accessible option for would-be cloud gamers, as it’s bundled into a subscription that 200 million households already have, but it’s quietly up against giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Sony.

Some of the biggest names in the games industry have placed a quiet bet that the “RAMageddon” will quietly push audiences further towards the cloud. As yet, there’s no solid evidence whether or not it’s paid off. Still, if you’re looking to get into video games but missed your window to get a relatively inexpensive computer or console, the cloud might offer you some worthwhile options.

If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a shrine to, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog.

That’s because on Labor Day weekend, Seattle is hosting 35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit. This touring art collection is part of the celebration of the anniversary of the Sonic franchise, which began in 1991 with the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis.

The Sonic Art Exhibit features framed concept and box art from the Sonic archives, several pieces by official Sonic artists, and a curated selection of pieces created and submitted by the Sonic fan community, which includes paintings, sketches, and even statuary.

“It’s Sonic’s 35th anniversary, so we’ve been looking at ways to celebrate his legacy,” said Jessica Perri, Sega brand director. “We commissioned 50-plus artists across styles and different mediums, and we also worked with fans who bring their own inspirations to the table. We’re displaying it all here in Seattle over the course of the weekend.”

Perri continued, “We’re really just excited to celebrate Sonic through the lens of art.”

The game was Sega’s first-party “killer app,” intended to compete directly with the Super Nintendo and its Super Mario franchise. The title character is a blue hedgehog with the power of super-speed, who fights alongside his friends against his nemesis, Dr. Ivo Robotnik.

In the last 35 years, Sonic has appeared in more than 100 video games, which range from some absolute classics to one of the most infamous misfires in the history of the medium.

There have also been multiple lines of merchandise; several animated shows; a successful live-action film series with a fourth entry coming in early 2027; a popular comic book, which is currently published by San Diego-based IDW; and a recent comic crossover with the DC Universe that did well enough to get a sequel. (Trivia: Sonic the Hedgehog is now technically a member of the Justice League.)

35 Years of Speed: The Sonic Art Exhibit is running at Seattle’s 210 Gallery at 301 Occidental Ave. S. from Sept. 4 through Sept. 6 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is free. After its Seattle run, the exhibition will have its final show in Los Angeles later this month.

Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill.

The education publishing giant on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Teachally, a small startup led by Bernstein in Bothell, Wash., that uses AI to help teachers build and customize lessons, assignments and assessments aligned to state standards.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed. The deal has closed, and all five employees have joined McGraw Hill, with Bernstein taking the title of senior advisor for Teachally integration and growth. He declined to say what the company sold for or how much it had raised, but said the outcome was good for him and his investors.

“We didn’t take in a pile of money,” Bernstein said, explaining that the company brought in a small group of angels and was able to stay focused and effective.

The five-person team is spread across three continents: Bernstein and a colleague in the Seattle area, co-founder and CTO Rushil Makkar in Melbourne, Australia, a customer success lead in Arizona and a developer in Ethiopia.

Bernstein is best known in Seattle tech circles for Sandlot Games, the game studio he started in a spare bedroom in Bothell in 2002 and sold to Digital Chocolate in 2011, after developing casual gaming hits including “Cake Mania” and “Tradewinds.” He later founded the mobile game startup UpTap.

Bernstein spent the following decade on the other side of deals, as a software M&A advisor at Corum Group and then at his own firm, Hemisphere Partners, which ran Teachally’s sale.

Teachally raised a small round from local angels about nine months ago, and later opted to try an M&A process. An edtech M&A specialist representing the company approached a small group of potential buyers, and Bernstein said he hit it off immediately with McGraw Hill over a shared view of what curriculum and instruction should look like in the age of AI.

Teachally focuses on teachers rather than students, developing technology for what the industry calls high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM, which is the standards-aligned curriculum that many states and districts have pushed schools to adopt.

The startup was working with about eight school districts at the time of the sale — fully commercialized, Bernstein said, but “still very much an early stage company.” It was named a top edtech product for curriculum and instruction by District Administration magazine in January.

Bernstein said he had to learn an entirely new industry after two decades in games. The M&A work helped: he’d taken other edtech companies to market before building one.

Teachally itself started as something else. The company was founded as EZ Reward, maker of EZ Stickerbook, a digital sticker chart teachers used to reward students and message parents. Bernstein pivoted the company about three years ago to focus on AI for teachers.

McGraw Hill, which went public last year and reported $2.1 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, said the deal will let it develop and localize K-12 curriculum faster and put AI tools in front of teachers already using its content.

“This acquisition provides a great opportunity to accelerate our AI strategy in ways that directly support educators and strengthen how we develop and deliver our K–12 products globally,” said Jana Thompson, interim president of the company’s School group, in the announcement.

Teachally is now live as a McGraw Hill product, with its own page on the company’s site.

Bernstein said it’s a second exit both for him and for some of the angels who have backed him along the way. “It’s a good Seattle story once again,” he said.

Wizards of the Coast and its subsidiary Invoke Studios released a first-look gameplay trailer for Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, a new open-world action game based upon the systems and setting of Wizards’ popular tabletop role-playing game.

Wizards, based in Renton, Wash., is a subsidiary of Hasbro and the company behind the D&D and Magic: The Gathering franchises. It has become one of the toy giant’s most reliable profit engines. Hasbro and Wizards are now looking to video games for additional growth, with mixed results; Wizards’ recent video game efforts have included both the generational success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and significant flops such as 2021’s Dark Alliance.

Warlock‘s first trailer was released during Opening Night Live at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, which has become one of the hallmarks of the video game industry’s calendar, particularly in Europe. Clearly, someone at Wizards and/or Hasbro has a great deal of faith in Warlock.

Warlock is set in the brand-new fantasy world of Darkon. Players take the role of Kaatri (Tricia Helfer, Battlestar Galactica), a combat veteran and swordswoman who makes a pact with a magical entity to attain magical powers. Specifically, Kaatri’s deal is with Tasha (Maggie Robertson, Resident Evil Village), an archmage from the world of Toril and one of D&D’s longest-running signature characters.

In exchange for whatever Tasha wants, which is not yet revealed, Kaatri becomes a warlock: a spellcaster who derives her magic from her link with Tasha, rather than the other available sources in D&D’s cosmology. Kaatri’s newfound powers include signature D&D abilities such as telekinesis, short-distance teleportation, and detecting sources of magic.

As such, the player can approach every situation in a number of ways depending upon their opportunities and preferences, from open conflict to stealth to clever manipulation of their environment. You can go in swinging with Kaatri’s sword, telekinetically shove enemies off of cliffs, or take an opponent out at long range with D&D warlocks’ signature eldritch blasts.

Invoke Studios, based in Montreal, was founded in 2022 as a reorganization of the team behind the 2021 co-op action-RPG Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. Warlock is its debut project under the Invoke Studios brand.

To make it to market, Warlock and Invoke have survived two leadership shakeups at Wizards and several waves of layoffs and shutdowns, including the cancellation of two other D&D-based video game projects in early 2023.

Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is scheduled for release in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

One of the video game studios impacted by Xbox’s layoffs in July has successfully reclaimed its independence, as well as control over its intellectual property.

Compulsion Games, headquartered in Montreal, was founded as an independent studio in 2009 and acquired by Xbox in 2018. Its one release as a member of the Xbox Games Studio network was 2025’s South of Midnight, an action/adventure game set in a magical Deep South.

In July, Microsoft announced the first wave of a planned 3,200 job cuts throughout its Xbox department, alongside plans to spin out or shut down five of its studios. Compulsion Games was one of those five, alongside Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts), Ninja Theory (Hellblade), Undead Labs (State of Decay), and Arkane Studios (Deathloop, Dishonored).

Subsequently, on Aug. 20, Compulsion CEO Guillaume Provost revealed in an interview with GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi that Compulsion’s management had successfully reacquired the studio, its staff, and the South of Midnight IP on Aug. 11.

South of Midnight is still available via its previous storefronts, including Steam and the PlayStation Network, but is currently self-published by Compulsion.

Provost told GamesBeat that no layoffs had been made at Compulsion as it transitioned to independence, and most of the team elected to stay together.

As for the other studios affected by Xbox’s July 6 layoffs:

• Double Fine Productions, headquartered in San Francisco, confirmed on July 28 that it had laid off 23 employees to return the studio to a “sustainable size.” It is once again fully independent and has control of its IP, such as Psychonauts, and will be exhibiting in Seattle on Labor Day weekend as part of the Penny Arcade Expo.
• Ninja Theory, from Cambridge, England, was one of the more unexpected shutdowns, as it had debuted Senua, a third entry in its Hellblade series, only a few days before the layoffs announcement. It has reportedly been spun off from Microsoft and will continue work on Senua under an unspecified new owner.
• Likewise, Seattle’s Undead Labs is currently under unidentified new ownership and still plans to release the long-anticipated third entry in its zombie survival series State of Decay at some point next year.
• Finally, Arkane’s status has yet to be firmly established. It formerly consisted of two studios, in Austin, Texas and Lyon, France, but its Austin office was closed down as part of a wholly separate wave of Xbox layoffs in May 2024. Several of the affected employees in Texas, including former studio head Harvey Smith, announced on Aug. 19 that they’d founded a new company, Black Pony Immersive, with plans to create new games in the same “immersive sim” subgenre as Dishonored.

Xbox is currently exhibiting at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.

Immersive Gamebox, a global interactive group gaming company, is coming to the Seattle region with its first Pacific Northwest location opening this week at Westfield Southcenter mall.

Designed for groups of two to six players, the venue uses projection mapping, touch-sensitive walls, 3D motion tracking, and spatial audio to create controller-free, immersive gaming environments.

Players use their bodies and movements to interact directly with the room to play titles based on major media franchises, including Netflix’s “Squid Game,” “Batman,” “Angry Birds,” and “Floor Is Lava.”

A grand opening celebration on Friday starts at 10 a.m. and includes a 2 p.m. ribbon cutting and giveaways. Bookings are currently open online, with limited availability for opening weekend.

The Tukwila location marks a strategic shift for the UK-founded company, which operates roughly 20 company-owned venues across the U.S. and more than 35 worldwide. The Southcenter space is its first step into U.S. franchising, partnering with local operators to scale the experiential tech concept across North America.

Founded in 2018 by Tough Mudder co-founder Will Dean, London-based Immersive Gamebox (formerly Electric Gamebox) was acquired and recapitalized by Harlan Capital Partners in early 2025. The company uses proprietary, patented LiDAR tracking tech in its “smart rooms” and counts Index Ventures among its early venture backers.

Pricing varies by game and time. An hour of “Squid Game” for one adult costs $31.99. Thirty minutes of “Floor Is Lava” for a child ages 3 to 11 is $23.99.

Immersive Gamebox will be open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

For the first hour or so, Desktop Explorer looks like a nostalgia project. The indie adventure game challenges the player to unravel a mystery by sorting through the files and programs on an old desktop computer.

Many of its puzzles are solved through clever usage of features and tools that will be immediately familiar to anyone who spent any amount of time with Windows 95.

On the other hand, many other puzzles in Desktop Explorer are too immediate and personal to be explained by an old OS on decaying hardware. Part of it comes from the fact that using someone else’s computer can feel like you’re crawling inside their brain, and this PC in particular has a glitchy virtual assistant that seems like it knows more than it should.

Maybe the computer’s actually haunted. Maybe it’s something else.

Desktop Explorer, now available for PC and Mac, is an indie adventure game developed by Recurring Dream, a Mexican-led studio based in Seattle, and co-published by Indienova and Redmond, Wash.-based Outersloth. Recurring Dream, formerly known as Crocodile Company, previously exhibited DE at the 2023 Seattle Indies Expo.

DE is a “screenlife” adventure game, in the spirit of earlier releases such as Emily is Away and Her Story. You never leave the protagonist’s perspective, who’s initially only known by her nickname “Guppy,” and she spends the entire game working on her uncle’s half-busted desktop PC. You only ever see Guppy herself through photos stored on the PC.

In August of 2012, Guppy inherits a computer from her uncle Hal, who’s just gone into the hospital for dementia treatment. The first time she boots the PC, she finds a message her uncle left behind that explains why he’s held onto it for so long. The PC used to belong to someone that Hal cared about, who’s since disappeared, and he was convinced that there’s still some information about her whereabouts on the computer. Guppy, who’s a lot more computer-literate than her uncle was, decides to pick up where her uncle left off.

The primary focus of your investigation is Desktop Explorer, an app found on the PC that comes with its own digital assistant. Desktop Explorer initially comes off like it might be a gamified teaching tool for new PC users, as its first couple of puzzles involve basic tasks like renaming and compressing files.

From there, DE‘s challenges rapidly get tougher and more abstract. Some require you to translate encoded messages or search for information via the cached files on the PC’s browser. For others, you need to edit an application’s source code, duplicate files, or change the date on the PC to match a specific point in time. While you can get a couple of hints in-game if you know where to look, Desktop Explorer is surprisingly challenging.

It can also be surprisingly creepy. While it never gets more intense than an average PG-13 thriller, there are a few genuine scares across Desktop Explorer’s 4- to 7-hour running time. Right from the start, it’s obvious there’s more going on inside this old PC than you’re initially allowed to see, and the closer you get to the truth, the more surreal it becomes.

Desktop Explorer sits at the center of an odd Venn diagram, between retro computer enthusiasts, people who enjoy mysteries, and the adventure-gaming community. It’s initially a nostalgic experience, but that’s a thin veneer over what becomes a sort of low-key psychological thriller.

As usual with this sort of game, the fun of it comes from being able to figure out its puzzles, which can be extraordinarily hit-and-miss. Some are clever, with just enough information to let you figure out the rest on your own, while others require you to make a big intuitive leap at some point or to have spent an unusual amount of time randomly clicking buttons on the desktop. One late-game puzzle involves looking up the browser history on the PC, which you’re never told how to do and which is never useful before or after that point.

(An accessibility note: I’m red-green color-blind. While Desktop Explorer has a number of puzzles that involve color-matching, there aren’t any options in place to tweak its palette. This is an increasing issue for modern video games, especially ones that were independently produced. DE isn’t the worst offender in that regard that I’ve played in recent memory, but there are a couple of parts of the game where I just had to brute-force a puzzle.)

Those mild issues aside, Desktop Explorer is a solid entry into the unique, narrow field of screenlife detective games. While not all of its puzzles are equally satisfying, it’s a short, memorable experience that rewards you for unconventional thinking. The appeal to nostalgia might get you in the door, but its unpredictability is what keeps you thinking about it until its end.

Desktop Explorer is out now for Windows PC and Mac via Steam for $17.99.

Amazon indicated for the first time this week that any video broadcast via its livestreaming platform Twitch could be used to train generative AI, unless users take steps to avoid it, which has caused a significant backlash from both audiences and content creators.

The story began with a post on the official Twitch Support account on X (formerly Twitter) which informed users of the existence of a new option on the Twitch dashboard. That option lets users opt out of Amazon using content on their channel to train generative AI.

That, in turn, served as a couple of additional implicit announcements: Amazon intends to use Twitch as a data farm, and this option is enabled by default for all Twitch accounts. You have to actively turn it off or anything you broadcast via Twitch could be fed into “generative AI content models at Amazon.”

According to Twitch’s FAQ, the data gathered from Twitch may be used to train a future model “whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”

(To opt out of Amazon’s training on your own Twitch channel, go to the Settings menu, look for the “Training for Generative AI” section under Security and Privacy, and turn it off. Don’t be surprised if this takes more than one try, as several users have taken to social media to report that the training option likes to turn itself back on when you aren’t looking.)

A follow-up stream from Twitch’s head of community, Mary Kish, poured some more gasoline on the flames. Kish aired a live interview on her personal Twitch channel with Mike Minton, chief product officer at Twitch, and Minton chose that moment to get uncommonly candid.

In response to viewers demanding to know why the AI settings on Twitch weren’t opt-in instead of opt-out, Minton said, “There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this. If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in.”

Kish and Minton made an additional point of drawing a distinction between AI-powered features that are already on Twitch, such as auto-captions, and the unspecified models that Amazon plans to use Twitch data to train.

“…I think our community has the reaction that I expected you guys to have, which is that you don’t like this,” Kish said. “Because this is industry standard, going other places [besides Twitch] won’t absolve you of this… it’s something that’s happening on livestreaming communities across the space.”

Twitch came out of the 2020 lockdowns in a period of massive growth, and for several years, accounted for roughly 80 to 90% of online livestreaming. Since then, however, its market share has steadily eroded. According to a July report by the Kyiv-based analytics firm StreamsCharts, YouTube Live and TikTok Live have both overtaken Twitch’s audience share, though Twitch does still handle nearly half of livestreamed video game content.

That, in turn, brings up some of its own issues.

“…It gets me really worried about all the elements I use in my streams,” Lance Icarus, a Seattle-based gaming broadcaster, told GeekWire via Discord. “I play indie games that are proud to not be GenAI. Can I stream that game knowing I’m feeding that playthrough into a machine?”

Icarus continued, “What about when I stream with guests? Some of them are voice talents who fought hard to gain rights against the very thing I’m asking them to do by streaming on our channel. I’m still trying to wrap my head around all the ramifications.”

Beyond the simple logistics, it’s hard to overstate the degree of hostility that Amazon and Twitch are facing over this move, from both broadcasters and audience members.

“They had to do it like this,” Seattle-based Twitch streamer Will Overgard told GeekWire. “Generative AI doesn’t make money, but selling data does. I guess they turned data collection on for everyone hoping enough people wouldn’t know to turn it off or forget about it so they’d have something to flog.”

Kish noted during her Aug. 12 stream that Twitch and Amazon are watching the numbers to see how many broadcasters actively opt out of being used as training data.

At time of writing, discussions are ongoing about what if any reaction this will draw from the creator community on Twitch, which still drives much of the platform’s business. One step that’s already been taken is that streamers have begun to tag their own broadcasts with “AIOptedOut” or “NoAI” to indicate their feelings on the matter. It’s now a question of whether audiences will follow suit.