Twitch has one of the biggest “virtual” cultures of the world, their users even have a different kind of communication system. Lots of viewers express their feelings, moods, or personal opinions on something by using the emotes. PogChamp is one of the most known emotes among them, and Twitch announced that they are deleting this emote from the platform.
The owner of that famous face, Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez is a fighting game player, and founder of Cross Counter Training, which is a website that helps players improve their skills in the fighting games. His famous pose was from a video captured in 2010. The emote became very popular in 2012 and it was being used around 2 million times a day. Until yesterday…
Yesterday, he tweeted about the events that happened in Capitol. According to Twitch, his statement was “encouraging further violence”. Twitch stated that this is the reason that they deleted the emote from the platform. There must have been some disagreements within Twitch HQ’s since they tweeted the statement 4 hours after Gootecks’ tweets.
There was some controversy among Twitter users after the statement. Some of them think that it is an unnecessary thing to do, and some of them congratulate Twitch for deleting the emote. Some users even started to suggest new faces for the emote. Twitch is paying close attention to the community, and I’m pretty sure they will replace PogChamp with a better face.