Samsung, the multinational conglomerate from South Korea, has had a long history tied to the gaming industry. The tech company has even participated in specific marketing events for different popular video games, such as Fortnite when it released skins inspired from the Galaxy Note smartphone line.
Now, it appears that Samsung Electronics will be diving even deeper into the competitive gaming scene. This time around, Samsung and Twitch Rivals North America have secured an exclusive deal.
For those who are unfamiliar, Twitch Rivals is a series of online tournaments where different streamers have to compete against one another across a variety of titles. The most recent event for this was a duos competition in Call of Duty: Warzone worth $75,000.
This partnership between Samsung and Twitch was announced last January 13, 2021, and this collaboration will last the whole year. According to Samsung’s press release, the Samsung Galaxy will be “the exclusive mobile device partner of Twitch Rivals North America.”
Deadline states in a recent report that this partnership was officially formalized during the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) when the Twitch Rivals broadcast was held. There are a couple of elements to this collaboration. For instance, there will be new Twitch Rivals Mobile Challenges; Mobile Mondays, a tournament series that will last the entire year and will offer all kinds of rewards; and “crossover events” where streamers will play mobile games together.
We’re leveling up. Pleased to announce we’re partnering with @SamsungMobileUS, our new exclusive mobile device partner of Twitch Rivals North America.
From low latency screens to long-lasting battery life, Samsung’s device line up is built for gaming. pic.twitter.com/ke3wSZoqlf
— Twitch Rivals (@TwitchRivals) January 13, 2021
The press release by Samsung also mentions that “Mobile Gaming Heroes” will debut some time this year, which will consist of those content creators who host exclusive streams, create original content themselves, and take part in different events that are related to Twitch Rivals.
In other news, the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event was hosted shortly after the partnership was officially announced. This latest event revealed various new pieces of technology by Samsung, such as the Galaxy Buds Pro earbuds and the Samsung Galaxy S21 smartphone line.
Twitch may be right in the middle of a few controversies recently—from the numerous DMCA takedowns that many content creators have experienced, to the platform removing the highly popular “Pogchamp” emote after the model said some very controversial comments regarding the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week—but the platform continues to grow and thrive amidst it all.
Only recently, Spanish streamer David “TheGrefg” Martinez broke the record for concurrent viewers on the platform. On January 11, 2.4 million users were watching him reveal the most recent Fortnite Icon Series skin.
That being said, the video game community hasn’t always reacted well to exclusivity deals such as this. This can be seen in the way gamers had such a negative reaction to when YouTube Gaming had exclusive streaming rights to Call of Duty and Overwatch League in 2020.
As such, we’re curious to see how the community will react to this partnership between Samsung and Twitch Rivals. Who knows? Perhaps the fact that the collaboration will be focusing more on mobile events won’t cause such an uproar.
That being said, it will only be a matter of time before more collaborations such as this will surely crop up in the future.
