Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat interviews Kevin Lin of Twitch at Slush in Helsinki.

How Twitch became huge … but still misses Ninja

Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service, has made livestreaming and content creators into worldwide phenomena. Fortnite broke out as one of the top battle royale games because so many influential streamers were playing it live on Twitch.

But it was a bit touch and go for Twitch at the beginning — 13 years ago, in 2006 — when it was known as Justin.tv. Justin Kan, Emmet Shear, Kevin Lin, and others were there at the start, when the idea of watching someone stream their daily life seemed ridiculous. But they kept at it, and their business took off with the livestreaming of games. They prioritized gaming and renamed the company Twitch.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.