Twitch confirms animated emotes as part of its 10th-anniversary celebration

Animated emotes are officially coming to Twitch as part of its 10th-anniversary celebration, the company announced today.

While animated emotes have been in chat rooms for years as part of chat extensions like BetterTwitchTV, Twitch is launching official ones for creators to upload themselves and to be used and seen in chats without any additional extension required.

Creators will also be able to enable animation on existing emotes, like Kappa or PogChamp. Those emotes can be tweaked to shake, rave, roll, spin, slide in, or slide out. The emote overhaul includes follower-only emotes, which are unlocked by users after they follow a channel. These emotes can only be used in that specific channel.

All of the new emote options will be in the new Library section for emotes, which will be available for creators. This section will house emotes that have been approved to be stored and accessible, even if they’re not currently active.

“Creators will be able to control which emotes are active and assign them to different tiers, all from one place,” Twitch said. “By building better emote infrastructure, we’re offering Twitch users more ways to express themselves, giving creators more control over the culture of their communities, and helping them be more agile by making it simpler to enable, disable, and reassign emotes without the need to re-submit for approval.”

Twitch said animated emotes will be available to partners “in a few weeks” and for affiliates by the end of the year.