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 rush to put out the fire before the Sim firefighters arrive, another flame appears out of nowhere. In Twitch chat, your fans are laughing: they’ve caused quite a ruckus in your Sim neighborhood, but as a creator, you get the last laugh. You just got paid.
With support for over 100 popular games, crowd control It changes the way streamers interact with their fans, while also unlocking fun new ways to earn money. By reverse-engineering these games, Crowd Control has created easy-to-use apps and plugins that allow fans to pay to activate an event on a creator’s live stream. So as a fan you can summon enemies in Minecraft, spawn a rare and shiny Pokemon in Pokemon Emerald or make creator avatar tiny in Resident Evil 4. You can use your micropay to make a creator’s game more difficult, or if you’re nice, you can give them a nudge to help you out of a sticky situation.
Over 70,000 creators have already used Crowd Control, which started as a Twitch-only app. Now, with the launch of its beta 2.0, the application is already available on YouTube, TikTok, Discord and Facebook Gaming.
“It’s 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 leaving his job as director of cybersecurity at Consumption. Warp World has developed other far-reaching video game projects such as turnip swapwhat was in fashion when Animal Crossing: New Horizons it was at its peak of popularity, but Crowd Control is by far its biggest technical company. So far, Warp World has raised one round of seed funding.
An obvious risk for any startup that iterates on other platforms is being made obsolete by those same platforms. link treeFor example, it was valued at $1.3 billion last year, but now, the company might be sweating: instagram implemented support for up to five links in the bio. Although Crowd Control doesn’t have any of its proprietary technologies, Jaku doesn’t think other companies can catch up.
“For someone to build a similar type of service at the speed that we have, and the library that we have… it will take some time,” he said. “I think we’re in a good place where we’ve established ourselves in the field for over four years.”
If a game is not part of the Crowd Control library, developers can now implement fan-controlled interactions in their games with the Crowd Control Developer Plugin, which is compatible with any game built on Unity, Unreal Engine, Game Maker Studio and other engines.
“With developers building these kinds of things, it means reaching thousands of creators pretty much instantly,” Jaku said. “Increasing replayability is always important to gamers or developers – they want that screen time.” He said that a typical Unity developer could probably get his game Crowd Control-compatible in a few weeks, but he’s also seen developers pull it off in a weekend.
As of now, Crowd Control keeps 20% of payments from fans to creators, which is the standard split for Twitch plugins. But now, as a cross-platform app, Crowd Control appears to be getting around the Twitch hack via a coin system. Other creator platforms like fan house they have taken similar steps to circumvent App Store fees and maximize creator profits.
“So $100 is $100 in coins,” Jaku explained. “Instead of those coins only being available on one channel, that viewer will now have $100 worth of coins that they can spend on any channel.”
Crowd Control only has a team of ten, but most of them have been creators at some point. Jaku himself began streaming Super Mario Maker on Twitch in 2015 and rose through the ranks to become a Twitch Partner. He then created the software that inspired Crowd Control to animate its Borderlands 2 streams in 2018.
“We are a passionate team,” Jaku said. “Everything we do is for the creators.”
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