A little while ago, we tweeted out a short video explaining some benefits of why we use our own coin system. Here I’m going to dive a little deeper into the points mentioned in to the video and beyond. Coins allow us to expand the functionality way beyond just activating in game effects!

Price Adjusting

Editing your prices is simple! Just go to the Effect Manager in the Crowd Control app. I twill allow you to edit prices while you are active in a CC session and only takes a few seconds for viewers to see the update!

Price Scaling

Price scaling allows effects that may be extra brutal to have a price increase on each use, and eventually cool down in price back to its original. This is great for events or streamers with very active viewers. This allows the streamer to actual play the game without being endlessly locked or stuck in a place, unless they really really want it to happen.

A good example is some of our teleport effects, which can force you into a place that prevents you from progressing in the game. As much fun as this is for a shot time, eventually this gets stale, so increasing the price on each activation more organically prevents these types of situations.

Not all effects have this enabled by default, but we can set you up with price scaling if you request it! Reach out to a staff member on our Discord Server for help.

Effect Pooling

Effect pooling allows chat to combine their efforts and work together to pay for an effect. Viewers can see how many coins are already in the pool and add to it to complete an effect. If for some reason the effect doesn’t go off or the CC session ends, the coins are all refunded back!

Refunds

Speaking of refunding coins, being able to refund users on effects that didn’t trigger is the biggest QoL feature of Crowd Control. This refund can come in 2 parts; auto refund and manual refund. We think refunding coins to users is a big deal.

Auto refunds will happen when an effect can not trigger and sits in queue after about 5 mins. Since we designed Crowd Control to talk to the game, we can get an idea of when an effect can actually happen and if they actually happened. The backend server of Crowd Control is essentially a queuing system, monitoring effects and letting them activate when available, as well as getting feedback that the effect was triggered. A handshaking, queuing, video game, live stream.. system.

Manual refunds are a more recent addition. This will allow the streamer to manually refund an effect or retry an effect. This is a great way to ensure viewers are getting their value even if the effect didn’t trigger properly. For example, if the effect wears off on room transition and a timed effect happened 1 second before, you may want to “Retry”.

Channel Points

Using coins also allows you to use channel points in a better way than directly sending an effect. Even though you can trigger events and refund points, we think merging channel points right into our coin system makes more sense in the long run.

This is an additional feature that you can enable or disable.

We also recently add a new feature to Crowd Control Pro, to allow you to change the ratio of Channel Points to coins.

Free Coins

What if a viewer is new to your stream, and doesn’t have channel points or doesn’t have bits to spend? What if you are not a affiliate or partner on Twitch, and can’t receive bits or activate channel points? Everyone can still participate in some way! Each new session of Crowd Control gives all users 50 free coins to spend. If those users are subscribed to you, they get even more free bonus coins.

For now Tier 1 sub is 100 coins, Tier 2 is 250 coins and Tier 3 is 600 coins and everyone gets 50 free coins. These free coin amounts can be changed when using Crowd Control Pro.

With free coins, Crowd Control becomes a fun option for any level of streamer or viewer to participate in!

Charity Setup

Since we don’t rely solely on bits or channel points, we are able to work directly with charities via Tiltify. This allows your donations to be converted directly into coins. We have shown that running a charity stream with Crowd Control activate is a huge incentive to get viewers to donate to your cause. In 2021, we helped raise over $370,000 for 28 different charities!

Crowd Control Ambassador, Spikevegeta, raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital while playing Super Mario 64 with Crowd Control

This, combined with our other features, really makes Crowd Control special! You can find more info on our supported charities and how to setup on our Tiltify Guide.

Live Events

Bringing Crowd Control to a live event space is also a really special way to participate. In these scenarios, we get to leave the Twitch only environment and allow people to get free coins for attending an event or purchase more through donations.

Crowd Control has been a hit segment at events like GrandPOOBear’s Speedruns Sessions and Awesome Games Done Quick.

Attendees can use their phone and usually a special URL to access a menu of effects. There is magical about watching your favorite streamer deal with inverted controls, in real time, 10 feet way.

What else can we do?

Building on the back bone of coins and an internal banking system to support coins is a big focus for us 2022. We will be spending a lot of time this year rebuilding our infrastructure to push out new features that we could only dream of when we first started all this.

Expect multi platform support, support for more games, more complicated effects, custom effects, custom stream software/PC effects, and IoT devices!

Crowd Control is the app that lets your viewers interact with the games you play on stream. Crowd Control supports +100 games and has been installed by over 70,000 live creators.

Use Crowd Control on your next stream by visiting crowdcontrol.live

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Have any questions, need help with Crowd Control or just want to hang? Join our Discord