You’re streaming a game of Sims to your loyal Twitch followers when suddenly a fire breaks out in the middle of your virtual home. As she scrambles to put out the flames before Sim’s firefighters arrive, another flame appears out of nowhere. In Twitch chat, your fans laugh—they’ve caused a stir in your Sim’s neighborhood, but as a creator, you’ll have the last laugh. I just paid.
With support for over 100 popular games, Crowd Control changes the way viewers interact with their fans, while also opening up fun new ways to earn money. By reverse engineering these games, Crowd Control has created easy-to-use apps and plug-ins that allow fans to pay to trigger an event on a creator’s live stream. So, as a fan, you can summon enemies in Minecraft, spawn rare and shiny Pokémon in Pokémon Emerald, or Make your creator avatar small In Resident Evil 4. You can use your micronudge to make the creator’s gameplay more difficult, or if you’re kind, you can give them a nudge to help them out of a sticky situation.
More than 70,000 content creators have already used Crowd Control, which started as a Twitch-only app. Now, with the release of beta 2.0, the app is available on YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Facebook Gaming.
“It’s been a long road of technical hurdles and trials,” CEO Matthew “Jacko” Jakobosky told TechCrunch. “We have a really cool solution that will work on almost any platform.”
Jaco founded Warp World, Crowd Control’s parent company, after quitting his job as director of cybersecurity at Uptake. Warp World has developed other large-scale video game projects like Turnip.Exchange, which was all the rage when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was at the peak of its popularity, but Crowd Control is its biggest technical undertaking. So far, Warp World has raised a round of seed funding.
A clear risk for any startup that replicates on other platforms is that they will be made obsolete by those same platforms. Linktree, for example, was valued at $1.3 billion last year, but the company may be sweating now: Instagram has rolled out support for up to five links in a bio. Although Crowd Control doesn’t have any patents on its proprietary technology, Jaku doesn’t think other companies can catch up.
“For someone to build a similar kind of service as quickly as we have it, the library that we have… it’s going to take some time,” he said. “I think we are in a good place as we have established ourselves in this area for over four years.”
If a game is not part of the Crowd Control library, developers can now implement fan-controlled interactions into their games using the Crowd Control developer plugin, which is compatible with any game built on Unity, Unreal Engine, GameMaker Studio, and other engines.
“With developers building this kind of thing, it means reaching thousands of creators pretty much instantly,” Jaco said. “Increasing replayability is always huge for gamers or developers – they want that screen time.” He said the typical Unity developer can probably get their game compatible with Crowd Control in a few weeks, but he’s also seen developers pull it off in a weekend.
As of now, Crowd Control keeps 20% of fan payments to creators, which is the standard split for Twitch plugins. But now, as a cross-platform app, Crowd Control seems to be getting around the Twitch chops with its coin system. Other creator platforms like Fanhouse have taken similar steps to circumvent App Store fees and boost creators’ earnings.
“So, $100 is $100 in coins,” Jaco explained. Instead of these coins only being available on one channel, that viewer will now get $100 worth of coins that they can spend on any channel.
Crowd Control only has a team of ten, but most of them were creative at some point in time. Jaku himself started streaming Super Mario Maker on Twitch in 2015 and has climbed the ranks to become a Twitch partner. He then built the software that inspired Crowd Control to spice up Borderlands 2 streams in 2018.
“We are a passionate team,” Jaco said. “Everything we do is for creators.”