Following its decision to remove Ryan ‘Gootecks’ Gutierrez as the face of the popular PogChamp emote last month, Twitch put in place a new initiative. Inspired by an idea from the community, a different streamer striking the PogChamp pose would be used for the emote every single day.
Now though, after 35 consecutive days of rotating PogChamps, Twitch is making a U-turn and will let the platform’s users decide on “the future” of the emote, which will likely mean a permanent new face for PogChamp. In its PogChampening stream later today, Twitch will let users cast a vote for their favourite version of the emote, presumably from the 35 that have featured since Gootecks’ removal (although this isn’t explicitly confirmed by Twitch).
The decision has split opinion and resulted in a number of alternative suggestions from both users and some of the platform’s biggest streamers. World of Warcraft streamer ‘Asmongold’ suggests taking Twitch’s most used emote to date, TriHard (which features streamer Mychal ‘TriHex’ Jefferson), and making that the new PogChamp instead. This would wipe out TriHard, which Asmongold says is frequently used with “racist connotations” on the platform.
Many are also hoping that another rival emote, KomodoHype – which did feature as one of the 35 replacement PogChamps over the last few weeks – is voted in. This is both because KomodoHype is a popular choice already, and it ensure no single person is attributed to the emote again.
Make the TriHard emote the new permanent Pogchamp
Removes the racist connotation that everyone on Twitch knows about, maintains representation, and uses an existing emote that has the same emotion. Effectively deletes racist meme.
Good idea or am I taking crazy pills?
— Zack (@Asmongold) February 12, 2021
Others are simply sad to see that Twitch is giving up on the rotating PogChamp, and are disappointed it never developed into the original community idea of having a pool of PogChamps that would display randomly when posted into a chat.
Either way, it looks as if we’re getting a permanent new PogChamp, which at the time of writing has been spammed 813 million times in Twitch chats, according to Stream Elements. Twitch claims in its PogChampening announcement that 62 million of those occurred during the 35-day rotational period.
The voting stream is taking place on Twitch’s official channel today, February 12, at 12:00 PST (15:00 EST/ 20:00 GMT).
