The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #32 - Twitch's Time Trials

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about Twitch's recent announcement of limiting the storage of highlights and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week ✨

Yesterday, on February 19th 2025, Twitch decided to be an ass and announced that they would limit the storage capacity for Highlights. Let’s go over the details and effects of the new policy, what to do now and even discuss some potential alternatives. Even though it affects every streamer, the speedrunning community is disproportionately targeted by this announcement.

Twitch’s New Policy

The main and crucial part of the announcement is the future storage limit for Highlights of 100 hours. This will come into effect retroactively and everybody above the limit right now will see their content deleted on April 19th 2025 until it reaches a total duration below the threshold.

Additionally, it is already affecting people right now: if you are above the limit, you will not be able to save any more Highlights.

Because Past Broadcasts only get saved for a few weeks at most depending on your Twitch status level and Clips have a maximum duration of 60 seconds, Highlights used to be the main way to preserve past speedruns indefinitely and provide a living record. And for many people they still are. These days, YouTube has taken over a large part of this and most speedruns submitted to speedrun.com include a link to a YouTube video, but a large part of the history is still found in Twitch Highlights.

What it causes

Now, at least a decade of speedrunning history is in peril. A speedrunner’s Highlights on Twitch are documenting their personal journey as well as how routes and techniques evolved. They’re a living record of a community’s progress and it’s an educational resource for newcomers. Additionally, leaderboards are set to lose countless runs that were submitted as Twitch Highlights.

Even if everything was miraculously saved and exported to other platforms, Twitch’s discovery features with the ability to look for content for a specific game only works great as a library for this type of content. Streaming on Twitch is now many people's livelihood, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to go through hundreds or even thousands of hours of videos to preserve their Highlights.

And the effects don’t stop at the individual streamers. Marathon organisations like Games Done Quick likely already have a different platform for their past events, but will be forced to stop offering them on Twitch. YouTube creators will have a much harder time to find clips and information for their long-form video essays that showcase a game’s unique speedrunning history. And for viewers, the ability to read chat messages sent during the livestream alongside the VoDs gives Twitch Highlights an edge over other platforms.

Ultimately, I expect that a lot of people, both streamers and viewers but especially speedrunners, are going to consider alternatives and that this new policy will do more harm than good in the long run.

Joshimuz’ overfilled Highlight storage

Arguments

Twitch claims that Highlights don't drive discovery or engagement like Clips or the mobile feed and are therefore considered ineffective. But for speedrunners it’s not all about the numbers. It’s about keeping a historical record. Low view counts don’t equate to low importance.

Twitch tries to soften the blow by arguing that only 0.5% of active streamers would be affected. But this makes it even more baffling that a drastic step like this is necessary. Besides, the announcement overgeneralises and treats all content alike. I bet that the percentage is much higher among our community. A one-size-fits-all policy is incredibly blunt and not the solution. It erodes trust in the close relationship between Twitch and the speedrunning community yet again, and some people will leave.

We’re all aware that storage and maintenance isn’t free. But other platforms have also figured this out long ago, maintaining vast libraries of rarely viewed content. In addition, Twitch is owned by Amazon, which also runs AWS, one of the largest cloud service providers with access to highly scalable, cost-effective storage.

Alternative Solutions

Let’s entertain their arguments for a bit and assume that some form of action is absolutely necessary. At the heart of it all it’s still a money issue and there are many better potential solutions that don’t cripple the speedrunning history of the entire community.

• For content that sees little traffic, Twitch could migrate these videos to a lower-cost archival storage solution while still being retrievable. It reduces costs significantly while still preserving these libraries.
• Similarly, another option might be to automatically downscale the resolution of videos stored long term with a low amount of views. This reduces their file size and the costs of storing them.

The Path Forward

We need to move forward under the assumption that Twitch is not going to back-pedal on this policy. Many leaderboards are already considering rejecting times submitted with a Twitch Highlight as the video.

If you are a moderating one or more leaderboards: help preserve the legacy of the game(s) you oversee. Launch a community effort to check the speedruns on your leaderboards and verify whether the videos are hosted on Twitch or elsewhere. Inform the runners that use Twitch Highlights about the issue. Ideally, no action is necessary if their Highlights don’t add up to 100 hours. But if they exceed the limit, advise them to export the videos and provide a new link.

Many runners have already left the scene and won’t hear about this, but their times still remain relevant or even competitive. If you don’t receive a response shortly before the deadline on April 19th 2025, please take the initiative to download those videos yourself, re-upload them as private videos to a shared community channel on a different platform and update the links.

For all speedrunners, here are some options you might consider:

• Check whether or not you’ve reached the 100-hour limit through your Twitch Dashboard. You’ll find the Video Producer under Content.
• If you are, start working on exporting and/or backing up everything that might be valuable.
• Create a plan about which Highlights to manually delete before April 19th. Don’t leave it up to Twitch to select them automatically.
• Stream your progress! Take a trip down memory lane together with your community!
• Raise awareness! Share this article and re-post content regarding the issue on your favourite social media platform.

Helpful Links

• TwitchDownloader can help you to download videos in bulk and save chat messages in a separate file.
• Matse007’s SpeedrunRescueScript checks your own runs on speedrun.com and lets you download the videos hosted on Twitch.
• Jonga’s Step-by-Step Process on Bluesky is about setting up a separate YouTube channel and exporting Twitch Highlights there.

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or on the Gold Split Discord! 📨