The PogChamp emote has been in a weird place since Twitch made the call to remove the original image associated with the emote. After making comments encouraging violence in Washington D.C. during the siege of the Capitol, Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez’s face was removed from the PogChamp emote. Since Gutierrez’s removal on January 6, the emote has featured a rotating set of faces. Now, Twitch is gearing up to put a new permanent face on the popular emote.
Twitch has been taking steps recently to fight hateful speech on the platform through bans and suspensions. The recent ban levied against AirsoftPhatty was for not moderating the hate speech of his chat, allowing donations with offensive text-to-speech to roll without a filter. Toxic gamer culture has long been a problem, so Twitch taking steps to remove it from its platform is a step in the right direction.
While Twitch stumbled a bit with the rotating PogChamp emotes, abandoning it entirely was never an option. The emote is the fifth most used emote on the site, having been thrown into chat over 800 million times in the five years prior to its removal. It is ingrained into Twitch parlance, and now a livestream on Twitch’s main page will be held to determine the new permanent face of PogChamp. After 35 faces were featured as the emote, fans will now decide who the new face of the emote will be in a livestream set to air on February 12 at 12:00 pm PST.
The PogChamp emote is used to express excitement and surprise over something happening on a stream. Whether that is a new world record being set in a speedrun, or simply a really exciting play or successfully executed trick. It is an extremely useful emote to drop into chat, so Twitch has to make sure that the replacement embodies that same sense of excitement, and hopefully avoid any problematic associations.
After Amazon purchased Twitch from founders Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, the platform started to reach a wider audience, which proved to be a double-edged sword. With more eyeballs watching brings more scrutiny, which is why the removal of Gutierrez’s face from PogChamp had to happen. There had been calls for it to be removed sooner after Gutierrez’s politics shifted towards harmful rhetoric.
With a new face soon to be selected for PogChamp, Twitch users will soon be able to show their enthusiastic support without the negative vibes associated with the previous emote.
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