Twitch is introducing a new feature, Cheering, that provide viewers with a new tool they can use to express their appreciation for their favorite broadcasters on the dominant streaming platform for gamers. Cheers are special chat messages, highlighted with attention-grabbing, animated emotes. They scale up in size and complexity depending on how many Bits — a new, platform-specific currency that users can purchase through Twitch — are spent.
To Cheer, users simply type “cheer” followed by the number of Bits they wish to spend (e.g. cheer10, cheer100, etc). The more bits spent, the louder the Cheer will be. Fans that cheer a lot will earn special badges. Bits can be purchased in bulk for $1.40 per 100 Bits by clicking on the Bits icon at the bottom of the chat window of participating channels.
“Our community loves to support their favorite broadcasters, and Cheering using Bits provides a fun new way to level up their appreciation,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear in a press release. “If channel subscriptions are the equivalent to holding season tickets for your favorite sports team, Cheering is like getting a crowd wave started during the game.”
Cheering is currently in beta, available for only select channels, including Bacon_donut, brotatoe, cobaltsteak, cohhcarnage, dansgaming, and dozens more. Third-party integrations from Muxy, TwitchAlerts, Design by Teak, and others will allow partner broadcasters to add channel-specific features such as custom on-screen acknowledgements for supporters’ Cheers. You can read a full list of participating channels on the Twitch blog.
Representatives from Twitch suggested that broadcasters would receive a majority share of the revenue from spent BitsDominant streaming platform, but have not yet confirmed this to be the case, or elaborated on what the distribution would be. We will update this story with further details as they are available.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.