Recently Twitch removed the PogChamp emote after its creator, Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, on Twitter tried to incite the Capitol Building insurrectionists to commit more acts of violence. Acting swiftly Twitch and pretty much everyone, quickly booted off anything with his likeness from their platform.
While speaking about the decision to remove the PogChamp Emote, Twitch acknowledged that the emote was something that would deal a blow to its entire subculture and promised to replace Gootecks PogcChamp Emote with a new emote as soon as possible.
“We want the sentiment and use of Pog to live on – its meaning is much bigger than the person depicted or image itself – and it has a big place in Twitch culture. We will work with the community to design a new emote for the most hype moments on Twitch.”
Just like how quickly they acted before, it didn’t take Twitch much time to quickly come up with a solution. Starting today Twitch will have a brand new astonished face aka PogChamp emote each day. Starting with Kenny “UnRoolie” McWild as today’s PogChamp.
The idea originally came from Hearthstone streamer Sean “Day9” Plott, who suggested Twitch to ask streamers to send their PogChamp faces and maintain a database of streamers with the same astounded expression as Gootecks did to maintain the original meaning of the PogChamp emote and to quickly introduce the new PogChamp emote in future.
With every growing number of streamers joining the platform daily, it doesn’t look too hard for Twitch to come up with a new PogChamp face to fill out the rest of the year.
