Twitch's Uphill Battle For Japan

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/10/twitchs-uphill-battle-for-japan/

In the West, Twitch is an internet superpower. In Japan, things couldn’t be more different. Mainstream success will be tough, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible.

Originally launched as part of streaming site Justin.tv, Twitch carved a unique niche through game streaming. It’s not only a live-streaming pioneer, but with with over one hundred million uniques a month, Twitch is one of the most visited sites online. Last year, Amazon purchased Twitch for nearly one billion dollars.

Yet in the video game cultural hub of Japan, Twitch is still fighting to get noticed. At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Twitch had its own booth for the first time. Even though staffers have been at TGS before, Twitch was saying, “Hey, we’re here. We’ve arrived.” Whether they have actually arrived is less clear. In Japan, Twitch is still a long way off from the dominance they enjoy in the West. The company isn’t releasing official figures, but said the country is “a quickly growing region.”

“We are definitely putting a lot of effort into Japan,” Twitch Japan head Victor Denchartphan told me this month via email. “We have recently begun installing our servers directly in Japan and adding much more bandwidth to our site. We plan to continue investing in improving the quality of our service for our Japanese customers as well as continuing to localise content and monetisation options.” Denchartphan stressed that this is part of a larger, concentrated Asia push.