Rachel Delfin on TwitchCon 2024: “I think when you’re going to see games that really capture the culture, you’re going to see them on Twitch.”

• Twitchcon 2024 just ended, and we were on the ground at the convention!
• We got to chat with a number of key people behind the scenes who manage Twitch.
• The subject of this interview is Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Delfin.

with Twitchcon 2024 Having just wrapped up in Rotterdam, the whole thing must have passed you by. But if you thought one of the world’s biggest streaming conventions had nothing to do with mobile, you’d be wrong!

We were on the ground at Twitchcon 2024 and had the chance to meet some of the key management people who handle the behind-the-scenes operations for the massive streaming platform. In particular, we also got to interact with them, and what? Mobile gaming!

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

So, let’s jump in.

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

And then I play this other one called Swipe. It’s a logic game that I’m not very good at yet. But you’re basically trying to finish the dots in the least number of moves with swipes. And it’s very difficult, at least for me.

What do you think about the current state of mobile gaming? Is Twitch interested in exploring this further?

I think mobile gaming has really opened up the appeal and broadened the idea of ​​games. Because it made it accessible to everyone who didn’t necessarily have gaming PCs or consoles, which could be a real barrier to entry and so it became a kind of onboarding point.

Now, some people are, of course, exclusively mobile gaming players. And then there are a lot of people, I imagine, who enter the universe. And you look at games like Fortnite, which are really investing in really deep immersive mobile games.

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

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

So it’s about making sure that there are actually peripheral technical tools to enable proper screen capture on mobile.

But otherwise, I don’t see any real limitations other than there being a critical mass of people who even want to see it. But we know that mobile games are very 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 this?

Well, as you saw, we just announced a mobile redesign. I think we started from where streaming was very much — you’re inside and you live in your room. Be it gaming, music or whatever your interest or passion was, it was what you were streaming. But with more powerful mobile devices it enables people to do more IRL streaming and work outside the home because they’re able to capture whatever they’re doing wherever they are.

I think it gets a lot easier every single year. It used to be that you had to have a ‘streaming bag’ which is basically internet power and everything else you would normally carry on your back, which was quite cumbersome.
But now, as you can see here, people are just using their phones and are able to do live streaming IRL. So it’s really enabled us to like, you know, get out of the house or leave the stationary setting and be outside a lot. We see more IRL as a result. We see a lot of travel series as a result. And I hope it continues.

Have you noticed that streamers are more interested in bringing mobile into their streams and content creation?

Just a conversation. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of, but it definitely happens. I think it has a long tail. It’s not something that’s one of our biggest growing categories, but I expect that to change at any time.

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

For example, we see people doing things like Wordles. So people often open a thread and do like, you know, ‘word of the day with me’. And as you can imagine, it’s Twitch; People are cheering and trolling because this person is trying to do that. And so I think when you see these kinds of games that really capture the culture. [of streaming] That you’ll also see them on Twitch.

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

So part of it is making discovery easier. As Dan shared on stage, we’ve specifically found about 70% of new viewers actually start their first session on mobile. So it’s really important that you capture that interest and that we make it easy to discover live streams that might pique your interest.

So that should really help streamers find new viewers because we’ve really optimized that experience. Part of growing is keeping people engaged, and things like stories, things like clips, that can easily grab people who might be primarily desktop users 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 that they can find the people they love. Grab the content beforehand. And then also, obviously, the desktop experience when you have those long sessions that people really gravitate to Twitch.

One last thing; Cosplay is obviously a huge part of many content creators’ careers. And a lot of these cosplays have a theme of mobile, or at least multi-platform games. Why do you think so?

I think there’s a lot of passion when there’s a lot of interest and a really good IP. So when there’s a lot of interest, it’s about the character work, the beautiful costumes and all the things that they really capture; But I think the medium has a point. It’s all about how lovable the characters in the story are and then you see all kinds of fan art and streaming types come around to celebrate and really reflect the popularity of these franchises.