In a blog post today, Twitch just announced that you will now be able to connect your Twitch accounts to Steam. This will come as a huge relief to fans of Defense Of The Ancients 2, as they used to have to choose between watching the official streams, which allowed them to get in-game items as incentives, and Twitch. By simply connecting their Twitch and Steam accounts, they will now be able to get those tournament items either way.
A subsidiary of Justin.TV, Twitch boasts of 35 million viewers every month, watching an average of one and a half hours of gameplay. Since its inception, Twitch has had a great supporting role in the growth of the esports scene, allowing streamers not only to share their love of the game but to make money off of the streams. In this regard, the company offers a partnership program comparable to YouTube. Aside from that, the service is becoming an increasingly popular place for actual game developers themselves to show previews of upcoming video games, as our recent Europa Universalis coverage demonstrates.
Twitch has nothing to announce further about their Steam partnership for now, but between this and their partnerships with Xbox One, Origin, Nvidia Shield, and Ouya, Twitch has been positioning its game streaming service more firmly across several different platforms. Twitch has gone on record that they hope to one day place their streaming service on all platforms, so you may yet see Twitch show up on Playstation 4 and Wii U.