In 2007 Justin Kan created the video streaming site justin.tv, which then featured a whole range of media content. Now, in 2014, the only surviving portion of the site is the gaming section that has been packaged into its own website dubbed twitch.tv. Twitch has boomed over the past year, attracting the attention of online giant Amazon, which made Twitch its largest acquisition ever for the impressive sum of $970 million. This sum is comparable to Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion, and highlights what could be a worrying trend for those seeking platforms outside of mainstream culture where people can share content and conversation in an environment unsullied by barrages of ads.

Twitch’s rapid emergence correlated with a rapid rise in the popularity of spectator gaming, a booming cultural phenomenon in the 9-18 age bracket, the commercial opportunities of which can no longer pass unnoticed by big businesses. Amazon evaluated Twitch at this price based on the website’s performance in the past year. Forbes reported that Twitch, at the end of 2013, had 45 million unique monthly visitors, a total of 106 minutes of video watched every day and a large selection of broadcasters made up of casual gamers, professional gamers and publishers. This makes Twitch the fourth busiest website in terms of traffic at peak times in the USA, according to techradar.

What does this change of hands mean for the unique platform that Twitch provides and the gaming culture that goes with it? The countercultural, advert free vibe and the opportunity to have a career as a shackle free broadcaster lead many of Twitch’s users to stop participating in mainstream TV/internet media. This will surely disappear as Amazon injects more unavoidable advertising and restricting regulations on upload content to generate more profit, and to avoid lawsuits.

Amazon could also take the decision to use personal Meta data (collected from your browsing history on Twitch and other Amazon services) to target users with tailored advertisements; a process that has been controversial in the past, especially with the subversive, technologically switched on demographic that makes up Twitch’s audience.

Hope for gamers comes in the form of CEO Emmett Shear’s comments to Amazon’s press release team: “Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently”. He also wrote in a blog post: “We’re keeping almost everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence”. It seems, for the moment at least, the executives at Twitch are committed to their current community. One other possible benefit for content creators is the potential for them to become sponsored by the site, much like YouTube’s partnership scheme. This would allow them to generate more revenue (more than the current setup that relies on donations and subscription fees from users), in turn creating innovation and quality in their work.

The inevitably depressing conclusion is that Twitch will follow the same path as YouTube and Instagram, and be consumed into the services of a corporation (Google was actually the front-runner for most of the time Twitch was negotiating its sale). It will surely be transformed to generate more profit and appeal to the wider public by shifting the emphasis away from gaming, perhaps leaving its original audience behind in search of more lucrative business.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Many agree that this is far from bad news for gamers. Amazon may invest in building Twitch up as a more pro-gamer competitor to YouTube, a site that has fostered a more popular, watered down gaming culture, and at the same time provide more income for more of the creative people behind Twitch’s content.

And, if we’re being optimistic, this sale will lead to an elevated status for gaming culture, making companies more likely to listen to the desires of gamers and allowing the culture to become increasingly participant guided.