'Twitch Plays Pokemon' Popularity Forces Company to Move Streaming to Dedicated Server; Gets Technical Additions

The hugely popular "Twitch Plays Pokemon", which was being livestreamed by Twitch, gathered more than 80,000 active participants. Due to its popularity the live stream started developing problems with chat, and the company had to move it to a dedicated server to fix the issues.

"Twitch Plays Pokemon" became a sensation as visitors, who have logged in, can type in commands in the comments section, and run the game using it. Players play "Pokemon Red" in the livestreaming website, which has gained more than 19 million views.

Twitch said on a blog post that due to the popularity and with more people inputting chat commands, it was forced to move the "Twitch Plays Pokemon" streaming to a dedicated server. Further, the company are also investigating the chat issues in Twitch. "Twitch Plays Pokemon" is putting pressure on the site's chat infrastructure, causing fundamental issues. However, the company has geared up for such issues.

"The unique nature and huge chat participation in the TwitchPlaysPokemon experiment has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system. We're always working on improving the QoS of our chat system, and this has been a wonderful learning experience for us," said Jason Maestas, director of customer experiences at Twitch.

"We LOVE TwitchPlaysPokemon and we want to see where this grand experiment leads us all. While it plays itself out, we'll continue to hammer away at our chat system and make sure it holds up to the load."

Meanwhile, Twitch has also added some new features - a voting system that allows players to vote on either Anarchy or Democracy mode. In Anarchy mode, every player's inputs are immediately applied but in Democracy mode, it chooses the most popular input during the 20-second voting period, said the information on Twitch Plays Pokemon.

Also, if players want the game to move from Anarchy mode to Democracy mode, there must be around 80 percent of the votes for it. If players do not want Democracy mode and want to move back to Anarchy mode, they need 50 percent of votes for that.