Controlled by Chat: Inside Twitch's Interactive Arcade, The Claw

The livestreaming platform's creative studio shares a behind-the-scenes look at building interactive hardware for creators & their communities

It’s arcade nostalgia meets the group chat.

Meet “The Claw”—a physical crane game operated entirely by livestream viewers, built by the Twitch Brand Partnership Studio (BPS), a full-service creative team at Amazon Ads’ Brand Innovation Lab. Part hardware engineering, part live entertainmen and part digital community experiment, the custom machine lets viewers type in coordinates, drop the claw remotely, and score real-world prizes in real time.

So, how do you turn a retro arcade cabinet into an internet-controlled live show?

Twitch BPS teamed up with tech and fulfilment partners Koko Digital and Fooji to make it happen. In this Q&A, key players from the Twitch Brand Partnership Studio lift the curtain on building a web-connected machine, navigating the unscripted wild card of live gamepla, and proving the ultimate rule of Twitch engagement: give the audience a role, not just a seat.

Muse chatted with: Victor Lu, global head; Patrick Moses, production lead; Adam Meller, senior creative director; Jason Latorre, senior creative producer; Dominic Galeano, creative producer; Caro Negri, senior program activation manager; and James Koo, senior influencer relations manager.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The Inner Workings

Muse: What spark or key insight originally inspired the creation of The Claw? How did the concept evolve from there?

Meller: Like any great idea, it started with a “wouldn’t it be funny if” type suggestion that we simply have a Claw machine running 24/7 on a Twitch channel that anyone watching could play at any time. And like any great idea, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

But really, who doesn’t love a classic crane game? Everyone knows what it is and how to play it, because its premise is so enticingly simplistic and rewarding, it’s impossible to ignore. So whether you’re the one playing it, or watching someone else try to get that one prize in the machine, we knew people would be willing to invest their time and engage with it right from the jump.

We initially had plans to give The Claw a backstory and create “seasons” of thematic content, but put those plans on hold as we wanted to first establish The Claw with creators, their communities and sponsoring brands adding fun prizes and variations so they could all become familiar with what it was and how it worked.

Lu: If you think about Twitch, content is typically longform, interactive and gaming-centric. We thought about how to curate a simple experience everyone knows and loves, that any brand could partake in with the communities, playing together. Enter The Claw. Whether it was playing with your family, friends, even strangers, it’s hard to beat the Claw. We are bringing something retro and giving it new life with a live community gaming experience.

Retro aesthetic, a constant suspense at multiple points (choosing a point to rappel, seeing if the Claw grabs an item and whether it can hold on as it moves to the drop), and repeated play factor. It’s a bit trolling the audience, but in a way that invites repeated gratification if the community chooses the right coordinates. It’s simple, gives customers a surprise and delight aspect and gives streamers something fun and easy to do while on stream. The Claw taps into a core memory for many people and streamers; the lights, the prizes, the level of difficulty, the gratification.

Any surprise learnings while creating The Claw?

Meller: One thing we were surprised to learn about The Claw, was just how eager Twitch communities were to play. For example, we piloted the use of The Claw several times as a “reward” mechanic for a Twitch Creator completing a standard challenge in a video game (e.g. Get 5 eliminations without dying). But after the Creator would complete the first challenge and deploy The Claw for their viewers, they no longer cared about the gameplay. They just wanted to keep playing The Claw.

The Key Players

When matching major brand partners with interactive tech like The Claw, how do you evaluate which creators are the right fit?

Koo: We first assess the alignment with the sponsor brand before and then moving to the format. With The Claw, it thrives on big personalities who are comfortable inviting chat into new and unexplored territory in regards to stream technology.

As an example, we landed on someone like Will Neff to promote FX’s Alien: Earth livestream with The Claw due to his combination of active, boisterous community members and his love for the Alien franchise.

From the minute his stream started to the moment the final prize was awarded, his passion and enthusiasm for the IP was palpable to everyone. The result of that? It became the Sponsored Stream with the most chat engagements in BPS history at the time.

What has been an effective way you’ve seen a creator engage their community on Twitch?

Meller: The inventiveness with which Twitch Creators develop new ways to engage their communities never ceases to amaze me. But my favorite will always be charity streams. When Creators rally their communities to support worthy causes, it’s always a powerfully good thing.

Koo: A few that stand out to me are:

• Tier Lists: Ranking anything live allows for extensive conversation at scale—especially with how mundane some of the topics can be. This has essentially been a cheat code for generating conversation, since everyone has an opinion to share.
• Streamer + Chat Influence In-Game Item: We see Twitch Creator skins in games like Fortnite now, but DatModz, Lost Ark and Adobe took that to the next level when they worked together to design a new in-game pet that could then be earned as a Twitch Drop. Because players/viewers rarely ever get a chance like this to influence something so directly in a game, the engagement was through the roof.
• We deployed a working phone number during our IRL Inn series, letting viewers in Chat call in to leave voicemail messages for the streamers they were watching. The vast majority of the messages were so wholesome that we even played them during some of the episodes’ outros.

What’s a common question brands have when it comes to tapping The Claw activation?

Meller: Probably the most fun common question we receive is “Can we include [INSERT BRAND PRODUCT HERE] in the machine?” And the answer is, “It depends.” Are [BRAND’S] product(s) applicable to be inside a crane game, or could we encase them in balls or squares/boxes? Do they have enough to fill the machine? Will we need to acquire them or will they ship them to us? But it’s definitely possible!

Sometimes, we’ll work with the sponsor to streamline this task by finding items representative of their brand while being similar to the generic items we feature when The Claw is unsponsored (plastic balls or animal plushies). By doing this, we can reduce the risk of the machine not operating as we expect it to while still helping the sponsor bring its brand thematic to the experience. What’s special about the Claw is we use the sponsor’s name as the mechanic for entering the game. Where else can you naturally have viewers call out a brand name thousands of times in positive association to unlock a new experience, in real time, over and over again?

The Live Component

Is there a “you had to be there” unscripted moment from a past Claw stream that perfectly illustrates the value of live engagement?

Meller: Every time The Claw wins or almost wins can feel like one of those “you had to be there” moments. One that specifically stands out is when Will Neff predicted his chat’s final move for The Claw would (finally) win the limited-edition Xbox Controller. He was so amped up that he said if it wasn’t a Sponsored Stream he would have ripped his shirt off.

Another is when we tapped DansGaming to host The Claw Sponsored Stream for Toy Story 5. I mean, having The Claw and Toy Story together is already an ideal match. But then you add DansGaming to the mix and when you realize he looks exactly like Al McWhiggin from the franchise, you couldn’t script a moment that perfect.

How do you design for technical hiccups without impacting the magic of the moment?

Latorre: Claw machines are naturally unpredictable. Instead of shying away from that, we lean into it. It drops a prize that gets stuck in the chute? No problem because it happens with claw machines all the time. The machine starts to freak out and move erratically? No problem. We just have to unplug the machine to reset it. We’re arcade managers relaying the same steps and the streamers often convey that messaging during streams and they even become characters in the narrative of the stream, with a hand sometimes popping in to shuffle prizes or give a thumbs up. The community loves those little bits of lore that make The Claw even more fun. A claw machine that works 100 percent of the time would feel like a weird machine to those who have played these kinds of games previously!

The Impact

What do you think is the difference about partnering directly with Twitch BPS as a creative co-developer vs. other livestream gaming platforms?

Meller: It takes time to understand Twitch. It’s long-form; it’s live; it’s chaotic; and it speaks in a language all its own—and it’s a language we’ve been fluent in since day one. But our heads have been in the game since day one. We’re not on the outside parachuting in. Because we are Twitch. We’ve produced more than 4,000 livestreams, so we know the difference between what sounds cool and what will actually land—and you can be sure we’ll tell you the truth before chat lets you find out the hard way. In addition—we’re backed by the canvas of Amazon, so our integrations and capabilities and what can be achieved through creative and tech are expansive.

Based on what you’ve learned about Twitch users engaging with The Claw, what do you think are key components of the most successful brand activations?

Meller: While there’s really no “one size fits all” approach to activating on Twitch, we’ve established several important principles that can help assure your brand shows up in a way that doesn’t scream “how do you do, fellow kids?” (unless you want it to).

The first is making sure everything you want or plan to do starts with a focus on the Twitch Creator first. Without them, there’d be no content for brands to activate alongside. So it’s paramount to first start by identifying which streamers are going to be the best fit for your brand activation / idea.

There’s basic criteria like: Are there existing partnerships with the brand? Are they really passionate about the brand? Are they sponsored by a competitive brand? Is their normal content relevant to the brand? And, of course, are they even available for the partnership?

But you also have to add more subjective nuance to really zero in on the right personalities for your activation. Who (or whose content) is popping off at the moment? What’s got buzz bubbling up around them? Who’s got a personal brand that complements the brand you’re advertising?

Knowing which streamers are the best fit to bring your branded content to life allows for a collaborative process of building the concept to take advantage of their natural interest and enthusiasm.

Secondly, Twitch is live, which means you’ve always got to expect the unexpected. Because live is immediate. It’s visceral. It’s candid and human. These things are the reasons you want to be on Twitch.

There’s an unfiltered depth to Twitch content where “you had to be there” moments can regularly surprise audiences—moments that hit differently because they’re genuinely unscripted in a world where most content is often carefully curated.

But just because imperfection is what’s expected, doesn’t mean you stop preparing for that. The predictable unpredictability of livestreaming—the fact that seemingly anything could happen at any time—is what makes the audience lean in more, which makes it something to always design for.

Finally, you have to understand that showing up on Twitch is more than a spectator sport. Twitch viewers are more than simple sets of eyeballs. They are alive in Chat and they’re there to actively engage. So everything you do needs to give the audience a role, not just a seat.

And you should always invite them to do so, never force or demand it. Because interrupting their expected entertainment is a sure way to upset them—and they’ll let you know it immediately.

Want to play IRL? Be sure to check out The Claw at Clios on Culture at Pier Sixty in New York on Sept. 22–23.