You’re streaming The Sims to your loyal Twitch followers when suddenly a fire breaks out in the middle of your virtual home. As you try to put out the fire before the sim firefighters arrive, another flame appears out of nowhere. In Twitch chat, your fans are in bloom – they’ve caused quite the ruckus in your Sim neighborhood, but as a creator, you get to have the last laugh. You just got paid.
With support for over 100 popular games, Crowd Control Transforming the way streamers engage with their fans while unlocking fun new ways to make money. By reverse engineering these games, Crowd Control has created user-friendly apps and plug-ins that let fans pay to trigger an event on a creator’s livestream. So, as a fan, you can summon enemies in Minecraft, breed a rare, shiny Pokémon in Pokémon Emerald, or make creator’s avatar smaller In Resident Evil 4. You can use your micropayments to make a creator’s gameplay more difficult, or if you’re good, you can help get them out of a tight spot.
More than 70,000 creators have already used Crowd Control, which started as just a Twitch app. Now, with the release of its 2.0 beta, the app is available on YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Facebook Gaming.
“It has been a long road of technical hurdles and experiments,” CEO Matthew “Jaku” Jakubowski told TechCrunch. “We have a really cool solution that will work on almost any platform.”
Jaku founded Warp World, the parent of Crowd Control, after quitting his job as director of cyber security. Quick, Warp World has developed other wide-reaching video game projects such as Turnip. Exchangewhich was all the rage at the time Animal Crossing: New Horizons was at its peak in popularity, but Crowd Control remains its biggest technological venture to date. So far Warp World has raised one round of pre-seed funding.
One obvious risk for any startup that iterates on other platforms is being made obsolete by those platforms themselves. linktreeFor example, it was valued at $1.3 billion last year, but now the company may be sweating: Instagram Rolled out to up to five link-in-bios. Even though Crowd Control doesn’t have a patent on any of its technology, Jaku doesn’t think other companies can catch up.
“For someone to build a service at the same speed that we have, and the library that we have…it’s going to take some time,” he said. “I think we’re in a good spot where we’ve established ourselves in the field for more than four years.”
If a game is not part of Crowd Control’s library, developers can now implement fan-controlled interactions in their games with Crowd Control’s developer plug-in, built on Unity, Unreal Engine, GameMaker Studio, and other engines Compatible with any game.
“Having developers create this type of content means that thousands of creators can be reached instantly,” Jaku said. “Increasing replayability is always huge for gamers or developers – they want that screen time.” He said that a typical Unity developer could probably adapt his game to Crowd Control within a few weeks, but he’s also seen developers pulling it off in a weekend.
As of now, Crowd Control gives 20% of fan payments to creators, which is the standard split for Twitch plug-ins. But now, as a multi-platform app, Crowd Control is getting around Twitch’s cut through a coin system. other creator platforms like fanhouse App stores have taken similar steps to minimize fees and maximize creators’ profits.
“So, $100 is $100 of coins,” Jaku explained. “Instead of those coins only being available on one channel, that viewer will now have $100 worth of coins they can spend on any channel.”
Crowd Control only has a team of ten, but most of them have been producers themselves at one point or another. Jaku himself began streaming Super Mario Maker on Twitch in 2015 and climbed the ranks to become a Twitch Partner. Then he created the software that inspired crowd control to spice up his Borderlands 2 streams in 2018.
“We are a passionate team,” Jaku said. “Everything we do is for the creators.”
