Twitch Announces New Storage Limits, Threatening Gamer Archives

The Internet is forever…until it isn’t. On Wednesday, Twitch announced that it will implement new limits on archived video Highlights and Uploads that users can store on their account. The new rules, set to take effect on April 19, 2025, will set a 100-hour storage limit on saved videos.

Any account with more than 100 hours of content will need to manually remove highlights and uploads—including unpublished content that is saved to the channel but not publicly accessible—or be subject to an automated purge of content that Twitch will carry out. The company says it will delete content “with the least views, until they are under the limit.”

The streaming service was pretty transparent about the fact that money is the reason for the change to its archive rules: “The storage of this content is costly,” Twitch said, reasoning that cutting down on saved Highlights and Uploads “helps us manage resources more efficiently…and continue to invest in new features and improvements.”

According to the company, just 0.5% of creators on the platform have exceeded the 100-hour storage limit, but that still amounts to potentially millions of hours of content that will be unceremoniously deleted, all to benefit Twitch’s bottom line. Highlights were introduced as a way for creators to pick the most important moments of their own stream and curate a reel of their best content.

While Twitch claims that the feature hasn’t been as effective at driving engagement as it had hoped, The Verge points out that the speedrunning community has relied on Highlights to save record-breaking runs. SummoningSalt, a well-known YouTuber who creates documentaries on various speedrunning histories said on Bluesky that Twitch’s decision to limit storage marks a “really sad day for speedrunning.”

Another speedrunner, MrJimmysteel25, tweeted that for their community, highlights were never about “discovery or engagement” but about preserving history. “People use highlights to archive, and you’re destroying YEARS of speedrunning and other communites history.”

Users can download and save their own Highlights, but this presents a local storage problem. And the fact that Twitch has imposed this limit as a means of cost savings leaves open the possibility that an additional crunch could come if, at any point in the future, Twitch needs to juice its bottom line. It shouldn’t be lost in this whole situation that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which operates the largest cloud storage platform in the world. It’s just another reminder that when you trust history to a corporation, it’ll only preserve as much as it can monetize.