The site alone isn’t minting millionaires yet, but it’s demonstrating a possible path to being a “professional gamer” outside the world of competitive eSports, and in the process, is helping create a new category of professional entertainer: the streamer. Twitch also popularized the concept of a virtual tip jar - sending payments of a buck or two (or way more) via services like PayPal and Venmo, if you like what a streamer does. Subscribing might get fans access to special chat rooms or emoticons. The service allows users to run pre- and mid-roll ads on their channels, as well as offer subscriptions for $5 a month. For a small subset of Twitch streamers who are dedicated (and good) enough, the site can become a significant source of revenue. For many gamers, though, the site is a gravitational center for their hobby: It’s a place to interact with fellow hobbyists to learn more about games before you buy them to study the best in the business, so you can improve your own skills and to enjoy watching highly skilled players compete against one another.

If you’re not a gamer, or steeped in internet culture, it can be hard to understand what the attraction of Twitch is: You just watch people play games? If you don’t get it, there’s probably no satisfying answer or explanation. These videos can best be divided into two categories: “let’s play,” the genre where people play and react to video games, while giving a running commentary (think: PewDiePie) and eSports, which are broadcast tournaments - usually with commentators - along the lines of, well, normal sports. Put bluntly: It’s a website where you watch people (streamers) play video games live. Twitch, if you didn’t already know, is a live-streaming service devoted exclusively to video games. Twitch doesn’t seem to want to be the new Twitter, and more importantly, it doesn’t need to be.

“If Twitter were ever going to be disrupted,” the Verge’s Casey Newton wrote, “this is exactly what I’d imagine it would look like.” But casting Twitch in the mold of a media-favorite app like Twitter is a mistake. On Monday, the Verge reported that Twitch, the live-streaming video-game website, would be “launching a Twitter competitor.” That competitor is Pulse - an updating feed that collects photos, images, and text from Twitch users.

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