By Alexander Lee • September 19, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Twitch is opening its own Fortnite Creative experience, called “The Glitch,” on Friday, promoted by Twitch streamers and featuring advertisers such as Domino’s and Peloton. It’s an acknowledgment of the inflow of gamers’ eyeballs and attention into the metaverse in 2024 — and an attempt to assert Twitch’s gaming-community dominance in this new world.
Twitch first announced “The Glitch” at Amazon’s May 2024 upfront presentation. Since then, the platform has been reticent about the details of its custom-branded Fortnite world, but it plans to officially launch “The Glitch” at TwitchCon this weekend. At the moment, 70 percent of Twitch’s 35 million average daily visitors are between the ages of 18 and 34, making them an enticing target for both endemic and non-endemic brands looking to reach the gaming community.
“As the brand partnership studio, our job is to make sure that we come up with big opportunities for brands to authentically align with the Gen Z and millennial audiences,” said Andrea Garabedian, the global director of Amazon Ads’ brand partnerships studio.
A Twitch ecosystem inside Fortnite
“The Glitch” is a multiplayer game in which users complete tasks to power up and fix a virtual world that appears to be “glitching out.” To create the game, Twitch partnered with the studio Look North World to build a Fortnite Creative world designed with both streamers and advertisers in mind. Financial details of that partnership were not made available.
“We looked at the opportunity and just the ridiculous success that a lot of developers have had with UEFN [Unreal Editor for Fortnite] and Fortnite,” Garabedian said. UEFN, introduced last year, is a tool that allows developers to build virtual environments inside the powerful Unreal Engine creation platform, then port them over directly to Fortnite Creative, significantly easing the process of bringing brands’ logos and other visual assets inside the game.
“We are building Twitch’s own ecosystem within UEFN,” said Look North World founder Alexander Seropian, who cut his teeth as a founder of “Halo” developer Bungie. The main “Glitch” experience will continue to exist regardless of specific brands’ involvement, per Seropian, and the experience will also include specific mini-games for Domino’s and Peloton, although he did not disclose how much each brand was paying for the service.
Both Garabedian and Seropian made it clear the main focus of “The Glitch” was to build a satisfying core gameplay loop. But it’s clear that another key goal of the launch is to maintain Twitch’s status as one of the leading ways for brands to reach gamers, even as the presence of advertisers inside platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox continues to grow.
At launch, “The Glitch” will showcase advertisers Domino’s and Peloton, with in-game integrations such as a virtual pizzeria that helps players regain health and power to avoid disturbing the gameplay experience, as well as separate branded mini-games for each brand.
“Domino’s wanted to partner with ‘The Glitch’ because it provides a cohesive and high-visibility activation with media elements within the game, surrounding it, as well as across Twitch,” said Domino’s svp and chief brand officer Kate Trumbull.
For advertisers such as Domino’s and Peloton, which were already paying for video ads on Twitch prior to getting involved in “The Glitch,” the company is framing its inventory inside Fortnite Creative as a way to build on their pre-existing campaigns on the platform.
“When brands come to Twitch — or let’s call it Amazon Ads in general — they think about it as a holistic campaign, because they’re trying to reach different audience, however they’ll get noticed,” Garabedian said.
Given Twitch remains the most popular livestreaming service, and Fortnite is one of the most popular games on the platform, expanding Twitch’s advertising offerings into Fortnite Creative is a logical move for the company: Seropian described the pairing as “like chocolate and peanut butter.” But it’s also an act of necessity. As internal pressure for Twitch to turn a profit ramps up, the platform has acknowledged that brands’ in-game advertising campaigns extend far beyond video ads these days, and it is taking action to capture or re-capture gamers’ attention in 2024.
“The Glitch” does not represent an official partnership between Twitch and “Fortnite” publisher Epic Games, although Garabedian said that Epic was “wholeheartedly supportive” of the initiative, with the Twitch team meeting regularly with Epic executives to update them on its progress.
For now, there is no technical integration between Fortnite and the Twitch API, meaning “The Glitch” is not technically different from any of the other branded Fortnite worlds developed by independent studios or agencies in recent years. To set its Fortnite presence apart, Twitch hopes to take advantage of the wealth of Fortnite influencer talent streaming on the platform by enlisting some of these top streamers to directly share and promote “The Glitch,” although Garabedian declined to specify which ones or how much they were being paid for it.
“It could be really great for Twitch and other brands, but they’ve got to partner with the right dev and make sure that the game is appealing — because at the end of the day, brand integrations work because they’re going where the existing players are,” said Michael Herriger, CEO of the Fortnite studio Atlas Creative. “So it will be interesting to see how quickly they can build up a player base to justify integrations into it.”
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